A painter's portrait

What do you remember of that wet day in May? Perhaps the waterlogged street, the traffic snarl or the impossibility of flagging down an auto. Milind Nayak remembers it for the colours, of the jacaranda and gulmohar fallen to the ground. "I'd just gone to the shop down the road, and saw this picture'" he says. When he returned to his studio apartment in Koramangala he recreated the colours with pastels which, he says, is really his medium. And so there they are, so brilliant and beautiful you want to pick one and tuck it in your hair! 

The pleasing pastel work is a part of a series Milind calls 'Following the Stroke'. "With this I'm exploring my skills rather than an idea," he says. "Seeing what my hand can do, sometimes working from right to left, because things move that way too." He might do 15 or 20 of these in a day and then just crash out in his studio, which doubles as a home on some days. 

It is this space that allows him to paint at the pace he sets for himself. It is here, when he saw the play of light and shade on a canvas, that he dreamed of 'Conversations with Shadows' his most recent black and luminous white. It is here, because of the little lotus pond, the pulmeria tree and the bamboos, that he feels connected to the Udupi of his childhood which, he says, was "a canvas saturated with blue mountains, the lush green of varying hues in the paddy fields and the gaiety and colour of religious festivities." 

It is here that he is surrounded by what's left of his book collection - "friends have borrowed and frittered the rest away" - volumes on Sargent and Van Gogh, Toynbee's Study of History, the Origin of Species, The Last Rain Forests, Huxley and a big wodehouse omnibus as well. "I've been reading since I was five," says Milind, adding that since his best friend in childhood was Gopalakrishna Adiga's son he had access to their vast library and everything from Perry Mason to all the books a young boy would wish to read. His tastes have changed a great deal since then, graduating to Carlos Castaneda and Adam Smith whose The Power of Mind, Milind says, "is a fantastic trip into the mind." 

If he frequently delves into the words of great writers, he also pens his own, scribbling down poems in-between painting. There are sweet, short verses of love and others searching. "I don't know if they are good or bad," he says., "but there is not a dishonest word, not a single feeling I have not experienced in them." 

I huff and puff
Up the long staircase
To Nirvana
Why is the Buddha
Not in sight?

But bliss is what it seems like as Milind works on, surrounded by his prolific work, a profusion of colour and texture, pictures of moist landscapes, abstracts in flaming red and orange and gentle pastels. Or, when he sits in a sunny corner of his garden, watching a bird hop on the grass, happy to have found this place. When he bustles in the kitchen, making a meal of anna-saaru and salad, humming a Hindustani raag all the while. "I want to learn music some day'" he says, "also French." 

But it hasn't always been like this. The decision to quit paintings because he couldn't afford its vagaries must have been hard for someone who began to enjoy the feeling of watercolor on paper when he was still in his teens. "And then, sometimes in'96, I was gripped by this irrational fear of death and decided to put a small compilation of my work together. It somehow found its way to Akumal Ramachander. Nearly a decade before that he had 'discovered' Shapinsky. And people asked me why I didn't go to him. I just thought, if I'm destined to paint I will. And that's what happened. Akumal found me, and he began to push me, ever so gently. When I restarted, after a gap of 13years, it was torture. And that's putting it mildly. But slowly, I found my way back." He painted again, his work filling high-profile exhibitions, earning critical acclaim and attracting a long list of buyers. 

And how he knows all he wants to do is paint. "As you continue, you gain confidence, it becomes easier. I realize I have to disconnect the mind as I work, so it doesn't prejudice my eye and my hand," he says. "Now my quest is to overcome the insensitivity to myself, my feelings and be honest only to what I believe in." 

There is the philosopher in him. That and the passionate painter. So be sure that more paintings from Milind Nayak will color the world in the days to come. 


SUNDAY BRUNCH - The Sunday Times of India, Bangalore, June 20th 2004
by Priyadarshini Bala.