ALL THE WORLD’S A CANVAS

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Sarindar Dhaliwal, who has made significant contributions to the Canadian art scene over four decades, has been playing with colours all her life.

As a little girl growing up in a family of first-generation immigrants in Southall, England, and lacking the toys children her age took for granted, she would imagine her few coloured pencils and crayons were little people.

Her solo exhibition currently running at the AGO is a testament to her enduring love for colour and texture. And telling stories through art. Whimsical, moving, very personal.

The title of her work, When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours, doubles as the exhibition’s title, encapsulating the overarching theme.

In the painting, one sees swatches of colour with names that conjure fields of dreams. Wheatish meadow, Royal henna, and Gossamer sheen, which is pinkish, not the silvery grey one might imagine.

The artwork was made in two parts, explains Dhaliwal. On a trip to France, she made colour swatches with the few pastels she had taken with her, mainly pinks, reds and purples. The idea to name them came on her return, and with text and calligraphy integral to her art, she aligned the names visually.

“People interpret it and find meaning, they think I must have meant this, or done it because of that,” she says with a soft chuckle. “But there’s no hidden meaning, no message!”

There’s an abundance of joy, an exuberance of colour that spills out of her works. Even when the memory associated with an incident or experience is difficult or dark, she deals with the ugliness and the pain by converting it into beauty. It’s like an act of reparation, as Renée van der Avoird, Associate Curator, Canadian Art, at the AGO, says.

“The initial inspiration for many of the works is rooted in childhood memory,” says Dhaliwal. “An immigrant child in a racist society, being tethered to your parents’ desires that don’t quite line up with yours. Since the early 80s, I decided to use my practice as an artist as a psychological canvas to erase a bit of that trauma. Also because my work is so personal, some people may not be able to relate, so I add aesthetic beauty to help them connect.”

She turned the memory of being told not to read fairy tales – her mother deemed it a waste of time, one that might lead to her failing at school – into an installation. Brightly coloured “books” fashioned out of handmade paper she sourced in Pondicherry placed on a desk that looks straight out of the 50s that she commissioned.

Racism she dealt with while working at a tulip farm in the Netherlands was transformed into a painting of ethereally beautiful tulips.

The brutality of the Partition of India is depicted in a map created out of marigolds. And in The Cartographer’s Mistake series, she turns Cyril Radcliffe, who drew the line that carved Pakistan out of India, into a bird. Dhaliwal references the Akashic Library that she came across while researching afterlife and reincarnation. It is believed to be a metaphysical record of everything that has ever happened in the world.

“The cartographer gets reincarnated as a bird through whom I tell stories of the places I am in. In Sydney, where I did a residency, he’s a cockatoo who remembers his past lives. He’s an owl in empty homes in India, where everyone has left for other lands. He’s a canary who sings to war brides to make them feel better in another. The reincarnation theme allowed me to jump around the world in different time frames.”

The First Wedding is an embroidered panel that captures the moment she realized she had to escape the role being thrust upon her by a patriarchal culture.

“Completed in 2023, it’s a memory from the early 60s that shaped my life over the span of decades.”

In a collage, one can see a woman playing badminton in a sari and a billboard with the question, Is your husband worth the money you paid for him? Both illustrate how women are front and centre in her work.

Sometimes her art comes from a deep place, sometimes a from a movie like Lagaan.

The scene in which the women in a village fashion cricket pads out of bamboo strips sewn together and stuffed with cotton inspired the bright fuchsia Rajasthani cricket pad embellished with sequins.

Before Britain joined the EU, one could buy many different varieties of apples, recalls Dhaliwal. After that, she heard on the radio, Britain was only allowed to sell four varieties. Her research revealed that there were thousands of varieties of apples, many with beautiful names, and she turned that into another artwork, with delicate watercolours and the names below.

“My art is all about the richness we find in life. There used to be so many different kinds of tomatoes, potatoes, etc., until commerce dictated what was kept and what was discarded, lost.”

Does she view the world differently though, seeing sparks of colour and beauty where others might see bleakness? Because there’s this other work with the once-ubiquitous Ambassador cars in India in all colours of the rainbow.

That comes from her first trip back to India after her family moved to England when she was three years old. Those were the only cars on the roads at the time. Then as the Indian economy grew robust and people began to buy foreign cars, she realized Ambassadors might disappear and photographed everyone she found. Ambassadors are a thing of the past now, but they live on in her art, including one in Kashmiri rose!

The same applies to her work depicting billboards in which she captures an aspect of India that was disappearing. Once painted by hand, they have been replaced with digital art.

In a collage that shows the Ban-galore of the 90s, with ads for Ganesh bidi in Kannada, there is an image in which the Hindi text is reversed, and another in which the English text is reversed.

“I can’t read Hindi script and accidentally projected the slide backwards. The mistake came to light when someone who had come to deliver some furniture pointed it out. Then I reversed the English script as I didn’t want Hindi readers to complain – it’s my way of fixing mistakes!”

The flowers in the painting from the Zanzibar Tea Gardens series are not a mistake, though they are from different gardening zones and bloom in different seasons. They are her favourite plants, chosen to fill a psychological space with beauty. When the realization came that she was perhaps never going to have a garden, Dhaliwal decided that instead of being sad, she would create her own perfect garden, one in which she could wander through at will.

A short film shows a mother slathering her daughter’s long hair with a mixture of yoghurt and olive oil, massaging it in before washing her hair and then braiding it. It’s a very moving, visceral depiction of what Sarindar faced in school when she showed up with tight, oily plaits.

But what was her experience when the family moved to Canada? 

“When you are a 15-year-old in London, you do not want to move to rural Ontario,” she says, unequivocally. “I was quite unhappy, very homesick. But really, it was the hardest for my mother. We went to school, my father went to work, while she was alone at home, away from her family, and she didn’t speak English that well.”

Dhaliwal left home at the age of 16, to live her life the way she wanted to, pursuing her passion for the arts.

“When I taught art, I would see many of my male students – from different cultures – would lie to their parents, say they had signed up for courses in IT or biology. A career in the arts is not really encouraged, specially for boys.”

Over the years, as her fame grew, after every exhibition, her mother would ask the same questions. Were there other artists there? Did she sell anything? Towards the end of her life, she often asked her daughter to paint her portrait.

When Dhaliwal said she didn’t do portraits, her mother would try and persuade her by saying she would pay for one.

“I am sad she passed away before she saw how many different ways in which I paint her, how much she’s present in my work.”

With exhibitions that run for months at premier art galleries across Canada and in other countries and with her work being acquired by collectors, she’s a name to be reckoned with in the field, but getting to this point involved overcoming several obstacles. As a child of immigrants. As an artist of colour. As a woman.

“People liked my work, ordinary people, because it was beautiful,” she says. “But in the arts circles, it was not seen as having much ‘weight’ because of the content, the themes. Women of colour, specially, deal with a lot with memory, migration, and issues of identity, and those were never accepted until the 90s. The arts world likes things that they see as ‘serious’. Now, I am happy to see, there’s a huge amount of interest in diverse forms of art, in different stories. There’s a lot more funding and arts councils support a wide range of work.”

And so Dhaliwal tells artists they have to do the work they want to do, not what they think people will like.

“Many artists think that their art has value if people buy it. I couldn’t have done my work if I had thought that.”

Asked for her vision of Canada as an artist, and if we’re getting there, Sarindar Dhaliwal says she believes Canada is a great country.

“Growing up, my nephew had friends from Pakistan and Afghanistan, he had Black friends. We don’t exclude people, people become part of the fabric of Canadian life.”

• Grant’s is proud to present this series about people who are making a difference in the community. Represented by PMA Canada (www.pmacanada.com).