#VerveScouts: Meghna Patpatia

While spending her formative years in the subtropical city of Salalah in Oman, Meghna Patpatia was presented with a tapestry of constantly changing landscapes — sandy deserts, lush plains, barren mountains — during road trips with her family. These memories stayed with her despite having to move cities multiple times, and her love for her natural surroundings and the yearning to reflect them only intensified over the years. When she finally settled in Mumbai, Patpatia instinctively picked painting as her major at Sir JJ School of Art and graduated with a degree in fine arts. She also earned a postgraduate degree in museology and art conservation from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in order to pursue a career as a visual artist.

“I studied museology and art conservation because I was drawn to the caretaking of our heritage structures. The study of historical techniques and learning to safeguard such beauty was deeply interesting to me. My patience, focus and attention to detail were all honed while I was in the field of art restoration. I continue to pursue it because I love being able to restore and revive the life of an artwork that is showing signs of deterioration. The feeling of protecting it and wanting to save the effort gone into creating it gives me a sense of purpose,” she says.

After learning how to create permanent ink tattoos under the tutelage of a tattoo artist and completing a stint teaching art at an NGO, the artist began experimenting with different papers, inks and water to develop a visual narrative, which she depicted through the pathways, mountains and the other natural forms she recalled from her time spent travelling around Oman. But Patpatia’s works are about more than simply reproducing sceneries from her childhood; they are a record of bygone epochs and the creatures that have experienced and adapted to geological changes over millennia. She renders the dystopic environments that will confront the future generations if we continue to alter the natural world at our current pace.

Patpatia likens this compulsive, inexorable march to a phenomenon known as “transverse orientation” — the principle also draws a moth to a flame, which may result in its death. Mankind, she says, is similarly enticed by the prospect of “ultimate development”, destroying everything that is naturally fuelling it.