Finchley artist Sheila Malhotra this week opens an exhibition that's already been widely acclaimed in India. HUGH CHRISTOPHER met with a woman who finds inspiration in aquatic form.
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Cruises for most are either spent fighting off a fearsome bout of seasickness, staring at a wide blue expanse or doing anything to avoid the woeful satin-shirted singer performing covers in the main lounge.

Artist Sheila Malhotra, of Christchurch Avenue, North Finchley, is the exception that proves the rule – for her, treading the decks is a romantic experience without equal. So much so that she has created her own nautical art exhibition, The World Through A Porthole, that has been displayed in some of India’s largest and most respected art galleries.

Originality is the key factor in the exhibition’s success, with Mrs. Malhotra’s bold paintings depicting a colourful scenes – ranging from standard sea-faring sights to surreal and inspired views of eclipses and chessboards – all shown through the confines of a porthole.

“Being at sea can be quite drab,’ she explains. “But if you look at thing from a wider spectrum, there is always something to see. One little glimpse can set your imagination going. Seeing dolphins, or a ship appearing through the mist – it can be brilliant’.

To understand this love for all things aquatic, we have to rewind 30 years to when Mrs. Malhotra was a mere 25 years old and living deep in the heart of the Himalayas. Being surrounded by mountains, vehicles such as ships and submarines seemed as something of fiction – the only way the artist saw them was through watching English and American movies.

Yet marriage to a sailor in the Merchant Navy meant that soon she would able to bring her daydreams into artistic reality.

“The thought of being confined to a shop seemed terrible to me,” Mrs. Malhotra, 55, remembers, “but when I was on board and looked through the porthole, it changed my whole attitude. I couldn’t believe it.

“Now the idea of showing things through the window in the pictures shows the importance the porthole has to me.”

It has also provided artistic importance to critics back home in her native India. Her exhibitions at the Jahangir Art Gallery, Mumbai and the Academy of Fine Art in Calcutta were picked up by radio, television and the leading lights of the national press, Indian Express and Middy, who were all suitably impressed. As Malhotra puts it simply “they had never seen anything like this before”.

Indeed, Indian Express’s art critic in residence, Niyatee, was so in awe that he seemed inspired to use a thesaurus to communicate his passion – claiming Mrs. Malhotra’s work acts to “establish allegories and esoteric possibilities, that perhaps were not so much here intention as an explicit detailing”.

Or, to put it in a little more reader friendly vocabulary, it beats a spell on the poop deck.

Sheila Malhotra’s exhibition The World Thorough A Porthole goes onshow daily at The Nehru Centre, 8 South Audley Street, WI, from Monday until May19, from 11:30am to 8pm. Alternatively, view her website www.sheilzart.com.

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