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Ability, at her feet

Of love and happiness A painting by Lucknow-based Sheetal Sharma.

Happiness can be as delicate as a flower petal. The harder your touch, the quicker it falls to bits. The softer you handle it, the more accentuated becomes its feel. And till the time the petals are in concert, aren’t they a sight of sheer beau ty, bliss and contentment? Well, add to this vista a whiff of gentle breeze, and doesn’t the joy get fanned?

An effusive thought this, is but Lucknow-based ‘foot artist’ Sheetal Sharma’s line of 17 acrylic works, shown at New Delhi’s Triveni Gallery till early this week, seems to flow from this premise. Flowers are her inspiration, a round-eyed Sheetal says without much emotion. For someone who lost both her arms at age four in an accident, she, however, wants you to understand, an inspiration is more a reason to live, happily.

So, drawing from one of nature’s purest gifts to humankind, Sheetal’s canvases feature jostling flowers in yellows, reds and purples. If in some paintings, they are blue, they don’t quite signify her blues. “You might see some of the backgrounds in my paintings rather gloomy but it is completely unintentional. I want you to focus on the flowers, they are bright, full of life and such a happy sight for me,” says the National Award winner.

With no arms to bank on, Sheetal draws using her toes. “It is by sheer practice,” she explains. The idea of painting something happens in the mind, and you don’t need a bunch of fingers to execute the thought, she insists. “If I decide to draw something, I try and succeed. Never have I felt that I can’t give life to a feeling because I am drawing with my toes.” Toes are my fingers, Sheetal states, even as she uses them to flip through a magazine to show a write-up on her.

In her 10-day exhibition that ended this Wednesday, Sheetal was able to sell a few of her paintings. “But that doesn’t run my life. My last solo show in New Delhi was in 1998,” she says. Having won a three-year scholarship from the worldwide body, Mouth and Foot Painting Artist Association, she manages to make ends meet with its help, as painting sales are close to none in Lucknow. “In lieu of the scholarship, I have to draw and send my paintings to the Association. They don’t put pressure, and that works fine for me,” she adds.

Besides flowers, yet another theme that Sheetal works on is women. “This is another subject I feel I understand,” she says standing next to the figure of a woman created by her toe strokes peeking happily from amidst a bunch of flowers. She has named the painting “Love”.

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