Capturing the elusive essence of water, making it come alive on canvas, is what makes a marine artist sink or swim. Her gift for painting the infinite moods of water, from furious seas to serene winter streams, makes Sheila Malhotra one of the best living painters of seascapes. In the sea, there’s “eternal depth,” the spookiness of which can be conveyed through colours as well. She started her painting carrier by copying from the magazines of her mother in childhood. She attended the Art College in Chandigarh and started painting landscapes. For 6 years after her marriage to a seafarer she sailed on the seas with him. During these voyages she continued with her passion for painting, not of sea but other subjects.

She reminiscences, “At sea I did only one painting that was my first painting and it is UNTITLED (made in 1972). This was done through the porthole. I had my canvas beside the porthole and I started to paint. On this particular day the weather wasn’t good and the ship was really rolling. I wanted to capture that in the painting.”

She gave up sailing almost 24 years ago, yet all the paintings about the sea were made mostly in the last 3 years. Since her husband is still working with SCI, she takes permission and goes on ships to paint. She has been basically concentrating on views through the porthole. She needs about 4 hours on a ship where she “can get portholes or maybe funnels or parts of the ship which I want to make out of imagination.”

The idea for the painting “The Floating City” came to her due to the global warming on this earth. As she puts it “I have made a floating city on an iceberg.” She has tried to show that if man pollutes the sea (which is already happening) the iceberg will melt. In the painting “Check Board” She had depicted the sea as a chess-board where the ships are in their respective ports. “Pollution at sea” has been broken into 3 pieces of which one shows the beautiful sight of oil in sea even though it is polluting it. The last of this century and of this millennium will be the solar eclipse which will be the solar eclipse which will occur on 11th of August, 1999. She has made the painting “Last Solar Eclipse Of The Millennium” almost a year ahead form her imagination.

Mrs. Malhotra does hold exhibitions of her paintings, one recently held had the theme “Through the porthole” at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. She feels that a lot of seafarers, their wives and children spend so much time on ships but they never really realize what beautiful things they are seeing. The sea is very beautiful

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