The World Through a Porthole. A sojourn of Sheila Malhotra’s engrossing artwork at London’s Nehru Centre
By James Brewer
Marine painters often say that portholes are what truly describe a ship. For London artist Sheila Malhotra, the circular fixtures are openings onto much more than the oceans – they throw a light on the workings of the imagination and on tranches of history.
While sea paintings can be ‘a bit too much of ‘nothing’, that is far from the case with Sheila’s ongoing series The World Through a Porthole. Her imagery brings forward sea lore, allegories and impressions of life aboard.
Her week-long exhibition in the ground-floor halls of London’s Nehru Centre in Mayfair was inaugurated on October 14, 2024, by one of the leading personalities in shipping today: Ravi Mehrotra, founder and executive chairman of the Foresight Group, which is a power in maritime enterprise, drilling, investment in manufacturing, consumer brands, digital logistics and much more.
Dr Mehrotra, who was accompanied by his wife Manju, deputy chairperson of Foresight, in his welcome stressed the intellectual and emotional symbolism of the porthole for those who sojourned on the waves.
The genesis of Sheila’s porthole perspective dates from sailing with her husband Sutikshan who commanded merchant ships in the 1970s. Once on board, she was thrilled to find four large portholes in her cabin. To her, these were the liberating links between the confines of the cabin and the world outside. As she voyaged across oceans she studied the pulse of the sea, capturing in her mind its moods which ranged from serene peace to full fury.
Her works blend reality with imagination and are most often allegories. Emphasising in her compositions the way portholes have been constructed, Sheila takes the viewer back to an era when butterfly nuts were used for binding the windowpane to the porthole. As the years rolled by, into the 21st century, she seized artistically on the passage of time by incorporating collage of period newspapers to freeze critical moments into her canvases.
For instance, she identified three caravels as Bobbing Joyfully into the 21st Century by affixing a strip of newspaper with the words “tearing across to Brittany.” Moving Shadows, oil on canvas, blends the mystique of the cabin with that of the traditional wheelhouse.
The great maritime disaster of the 20th century, which began with the maiden voyage on April10, 2012, from Southampton but never reached New York, is represented “through a porthole” in Titanic I, painted in oil on canvas. We see four chairs, empty of passengers or crew, around a circular table (a ghostly echo of the porthole shape), with the inscription alongside: Did they play cards! Did they confer! Or just sat and waited! As the last tunes of the orchestra resonated…
Even more grimly, Titanic II has inside the image of shattered porthole glass a facsimile of a torn sheet of the Daily Mirror of April 16, 1912.
In other artworks, tropical storms are recalled, as are Joyful Echoes. Greatly striking are two panels of shimmering Reflections of the waves, one in purple in acrylic on canvas at left and oil on the right.
An oil painting on canvas, A bygone era: 20th century boarded away, shows music and invention, events of the previous century printed on strips of newspaper. The impressions of the century are in turn cheerful and gloomy: Michael Jackson in the 1980s; the Beatles’ popularity in the 1960s; rock music… pop music… wars, atomic bomb…
A London-based artist, and freelance art critic, Sheila was raised in Shimla, the summer capital of the British Raj in India. She studied at Auckland House School, graduated from Punjab University, and studied art at the Government College of Art, Chandigarh, Punjab, one of the leading colleges of its kind in India.
