Anjana Mehra (b.1949) studied painting at the Sir JJ School of Art (1965) in Mumbai before pursuing her masters in printmaking at M.S.U. in Baroda (1972). Her drawings from the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate a practice defined by patience, introspection and remarkable technical control. Working primarily in graphite, Mehra developed a distinctive subtractive method: she first built dense grounds of powdered graphite and pigment and then gradually erased into them, allowing images to emerge from darkness.
Writing in Bombay magazine in 1982, Nikki Ty-Tomkins described this process as “an extraordinary one…a collation of etching techniques miraculously transformed into pencil,” noting the artist’s ability to produce “infinite gradations out of the darkest velvet black.” The delicate erasures and tonal transitions give her drawings an atmospheric depth that belies their often modest scale.
Mehra’s imagery frequently draws on fragments of the natural world - driftwood, coral, shells and creatures washed up along the shoreline. As Kamala Kapoor observed in a 1982 catalogue essay, these elements take on the character of “iconic images drawn from oceanic depths,” emerging from the paper through layers of graphite and erasure.