As an artist, Meenal Singh operates from a point of deep engagement with her process and medium, which is primarily oil-on-canvas. Working not with brushstrokes or palette knives, but the unique flow and behaviour of the pigments themselves, she transforms liquid colours into vast swathes of form and space, emulating imaginary landscapes and abstracted topographies of the mind. Over the years, she has built a repertoire of expansive formats; paintings that play with intense colour, texture, transparency, and the visual effects of light and motion. From her early work that presented busy compositions and densely layered surfaces, Meenal’s artistic language has evolved into a distinctly calm and contemplative space, alongside her confidence and mastery in the medium.

Meenal’s work evokes a sense of immediacy and proximity – the large frames intend to include and embrace the viewer within the picture-plane rather than the usual inward gaze from an external perspective. According to the artist, her inspiration is rooted in the translation of emotional experience through the all-consuming process of painterly experimentation. She sees colour as having historical and cultural significance, reflective of multiple meanings in the context of human understanding. Each colour, or combination of colours in her work holds the power to both express and invoke feelings, sustained by intuitive responses to the abstraction.

...Connecting with her past training and practise as an architect, Meenal’s engagement with structure, volume and solidity comes through visibly. While her creative journey encompasses sculpture and formal applications within three-dimensional space, the act of painting is central to her expressive journey. Explaining that her process is bound deeply to self-exploration, she says, “I am still thinking like an architect, as though I am simply facilitating the material and allowing it to do what it does best.” She has consistently chosen her own path and trusted the process, disregarding rigid technical conventions along the way.

The field of ecology, and a practical engagement with land and the environment forms an important part of her life, as she intentionally pays less attention to the man-made. Her paintings reflect subconsciously imbibed learnings from nature, not as direct narratives but as filtered essences. For instance, the works echo elements of design that exist in the natural world, including shapes, patterns, colours, textures, and atmospheres that make up the earth we inhabit – providing an open-ended encounter for the viewer.

Deeply interested in creative practices from her childhood, it was Meenal’s education in Architecture and subsequently conservation training in the same stream, that led her into the world of rendering, colour theory and 3D visualisation. She graduated from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and holds a Master of Architecture in Conservation from the Texas A&M University, USA. She followed it with a course in metal sculpture at the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington DC. Meenal lives and works between her studio in Bangalore and farm in Denkanikottai, Tamil Nadu, where with a community of friends and family, she has been reforesting the land from a lantana infested scrub to a native deciduous forest since 2014.

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