Suman 'Milan' Khanolkar

"I paint when my feelings want to be seen and express themselves... I express through images, what I can't express through words or otherwise... it is essential for me to express like this, otherwise I am mute, without language... I work with a blank surface, images merge and happen. I don't impose them on the canvas as pre- thought images. I don't control them... For me there is great fun in playing with colour, line textures... First I put colours on the canvas; usually they are fresh, bright, bold colours... Then I need to bind them togather, and I use lines to do this... The line plays a very important role in my paintings... Sometimes the line runs, holds, lets go... The line creates the narration, the story telling... The colour is the substance; the line sculpts and gives it form... My stories are also other peoples stories, open to everyone, to see and feel for themselves, so that it goes on. The truth is everyone's truth, a subjective experience felt for that moment."

-Suman 'Milan' Khanolkar

SUMAN KHANOLKAR, known to many as Milan, was born on 4th December 1957 into a family that was far removed from the world of art. A strongly sensate person, Milan realised very young that she saw the world through images, colours and textures, and still finds as an adult that her instinctive language of communication with the world is through images. In keeping with this instinct, Milan proceeded to get her BFA from the Goa College of Art in 1980, and later her diploma in Ceramics and Pottery from J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai in 1982.

Over the years she has consistently explored both these media as her way of self expression, blending the usually divided worlds of art and craft in a language that expresses her needs to express a diverse range within herself.

Miniature painting, folk art traditions and matisse have all been influences on her; the artist for his bold use of colour, and the Indian miniature tradition for the strong, but controlled use of colour and line, creating a blend betweeen the spiritual toned expressions of mood. The paintings may be representational in form, but they are not realistic. Instead they convey an inner world of feeling, an interior experience of the world.

Choosing very early on not to enter the art world as an artist who professionally sells her work, she instead moved into spaces where her work was more a medium of dialogue in the real worlds of people. Over the last thirty years Milan has worked in diverse spaces. In 1984 Milan worked with the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial, Pune, heading the Ceramics Section, and developing its outreach programme with rural women, and later with the Silvepura rural school, part of the art ashram of Jyoti and Jane Sahi, using art as a medium of education with the children. Over the years she held workshops with teachers and educators in order to teach them to use art as part of their way of knowing the personal worlds of the children they taught. In the 1990's, while still painting, doing pottery and making murals, Milan was also associated with a school for street children, where art and craft again was the medium through which the children learnt to read and write, creating their own individual texts by drawing and painting their own personal stories and histories, and also more importantly the way through which these highly vagabond children were able to assert their sense of belonging, family, community and ancestry.

Art once again became the language of connection and healing, rather than an object of fascination. In 2000, and for the next ten years, Milan consciously entered into a self reflective discipline with her own art, as a way of dialoguing and communicating with her interior world and the world that she was part of. Milan was a part of therapeutic groups, as a co- facilitator, using art, craft, clay, sculpting and dream work, that were intended to explore the lives of women and men choosing to expand their awareness of themselves and their work.

Over these thirty years, Milan has in a consistent and disciplined way produced a large body of work, including paintings, sculpture, murals and craft, that reflects her intimate relationship with art as a form of expression of the human spirit.

Bridging the split between creative interiority and social reality, she is an artist who is deeply grounded, and connected with the collective world that she is part of. Milan has demonstrated that it is possible to live a committed solitude along with a deep connection with community and world.

- Anjali D'Souza