Jayshree Vakil

Introducing The Artist: Jayshree Vakil

Jayshree’s versatile personality reflects in her work through many mediums. Her paintings liberate color and lines from being purely descriptive to becoming free and expressive - suggesting emotion rather than a simple documentation of what the eye sees. Jayshree’s imaginative creative process creates abstraction with energy, color, and feeling.

Jayshree employs figurative motifs to facilitate modern composition. Liberating form, line, and color from mechanical description to produce a poetic, imaginative way of seeing. Carefully attentive to the play of forms, she draws from immediate pleasures underlying everyday visual experience. Rhythms of line, rhymes of color and spatial relationships, and unexpected vitality in "inanimate" objects, all make each work fresh, dynamic, and emotionally resonant.

For Jayshree, "It is simplification; instead of drawing an outline and then filling it in with color, with one modifying the other, I draw directly in color. It is not a starting point, but a culmination."

While some critics admired her progressive attitude and approach, a few interpreted her art as a lack of discipline and style, when she exhibited in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

"I do not paint things, I paint the difference between things."

Early Distinction in Painting:

Jayshree started painting over 35 years ago. She earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from the prestigious Sir J. J. School of Arts of the University of Bombay, India in 1980.

Numerous exhibitions of her work were held in India between 1978 and 1980, in Bangalore, Bombay (now Mumbai), and Ahmedabad. Additionally, her work was displayed at exhibitions by leading art associations: the Bombay Art Society, Art Society of India, Artists’ Centre, Bombay Arts & Sports, Mysore Association, and the Maharashtra State Art Exhibition.

Jayshree’s work has been acquired by a number of notable private collections. Among these are those of industrialists (Mr. Jaikrishna Harivallabhdas, Mr. Pratap Narsee), cultural icons (Mr. Dilip Kumar, Mr. Vijay Merchant), and political leaders (Mr. Rajni Patel, Mrs. Pratibha Sharad Pawar). Her paintings were also bought by the Fellowship School, Mumbai and Ms. Fine Diamonds, Mumbai, among others.

Jayshree’s creativity and original work earned her a number of prestigious awards, among them the All India Art Competition (Delhi) – 1979, Bombay Suburban Exhibition of Paintings – 1978, 1979, and Sir J. J. School of Art Annual Exhibition – 1979.