Shanti Panchal is a leading London-based Indian artist with an international reputation. He has won the 1991 National Portrait Gallery/BP Portrait Award, was Artist-in-Residence at the National Gallery in London in 1994, and was a 2003 nominee for the UK Asian Achievers Awards. Executing only a few pictures each year, Panchal's fascinating and monumental watercolours successfully unite an Indian spirit with western form, creating a timeless quality with universal appeal. Images, colours and surfaces create simple yet powerful relationships and can be enjoyed for both visual quality and narrative content. Born in 1951 in Mesar in the state of Gujarat, Shanti Panchal studied art at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai where he also worked on a fellowship for a year before taking on a teaching assignment at Sophia College Polytechnic in the city. Further study at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London on a British Council Scholarship directed his future track that included a stint as artist-in-residence at the British Museum in London. In 1978 he decided to settle finally in London and continue his artistic career.
For twenty five years Panchal has worked solely in watercolour, but has pushed beyond its traditional limits to a new 21st century approach. His method is laborious: after outlining the composition in pencil he builds up more than a dozen layers of colour wash. Single works can take months to complete. Starting with a small format in the early years (due to a shortage of studio space) he has turned more and more to larger sizes, some stretching to an imposing scale. His paper too has become thicker (600 grams weight), almost as thick as leather. The painter mixes colour on the paper itself, using a flat oil painting brush, removing, re-mixing and blotting as he goes along. "A great deal of saturation thus takes place", says Panchal who builds his layered depths (often as many as 12deep) in the manner of a meditative exercise. "Only this paper can take this kind of hammering", adds the artist who creates atmospheres of veiled luminosity to produce his Giotto-esque, fresco-like finish. Shanti Panchal's distinctive, subtly coloured compositions are immediately recognisable and deceptively easy to assimilate. But the paintings warrant a viewing as concentrated as the work that goes into their production. Their message lies not on the surface, not in a quick reading of their figure compositions and firmly drawn figures and suspended narrative, but in the spaces between the figures, and in the intensity and depth of colour. The artist often integrates issues of displacement and alienation into his works through the creation of surroundings, though firmly grounded and realistic, seeming distant from human subjects. Qualified to tackle the complex sensibilities of a life lived between two cultures, Panchals works are a sentient presentation of the migrant experience with its sense of alienation, loneliness, uprootment and understanding of imagined homelands re-invented from memory and desire.
