Tanya Minhas’s childhood memories are saturated in color. As a young girl, she engaged in all sorts of artistic endeavors. If she wasn’t drawing, she was practicing her embroidery. “I had a natural ability to draw and to paint,” she says. “I was always making things: French hems, crochet, and following recipes.” Her mother was a painter, and her father played professional cricket. Off the field, her father filled the house with jazzy tunes—the voices of Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, and Dinah Washington forming the soundtrack of Minhas’s adolescence.
Minhas was raised in Karachi, Pakistan, where she recalls a traveling salesman selling exquisite handwoven pashminas transported across the border from India. The finery of the handiwork and detailed patterns imprinted their way into her mind. She also recalls highly anticipated visits from the “book man,” who peddled his way around town offering books on loan for the price of a deposit. “I discovered new worlds through reading,” Minhas says.
“Books are the ultimate gift.” She often raided her mother’s library, devouring the stories she discovered there. Her mother was a fan of the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake—a combination Minhas emulates today, working from her Long Island and Upper East Side studios.
After moving from Pakistan to New York, Minhas’s love of learning continued on and off the page. She graduated from Princeton University with a BA in International Affairs and Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School. Afterwards, she pursued a PhD from Columbia University in classical Persian poetry. For Minhas, “poetry is the ultimate art; it captures a feeling and the invisible.”
In 1998 Minhas received an MBA from Columbia’s business school. “Leonardo da Vinci was a painter and an architect,” she says. Like da Vinci, Minhas admits to not feeling limited to doing one thing with the life she has been given. As a young woman, she didn’t see herself becoming a professional artist. “It was a passion but I didn’t think of painting as a career when I was very young,” she explains.
First, she worked for the World Bank, then as a consultant, then in PR, and even started a children’s clothing line named Honey Collection New York after her daughter, Honey—all while painting at the Arts Students League of New York.
But then, in 2010, she endured a trauma that submerged her in an era of grief. Unable to put feelings into words, to communicate she turned to her old friends, drawing and painting. Harnessing her creative energy became cathartic. While her mother had stopped painting after the birth of her first child—she said she had “nothing left to say”—Minhas knew painting could help her say it all. In this moment, she vowed to live her life as an artist.
The exhibition Tanya Minhas: A Tapestry of Dreams opens in mid-September at Winston Wächter Fine Art in New York City. The new body of work features paintings that explore the natural world and its interconnected systems. Front and center are landscapes employing Minhas’s signature abstracted mark making techniques whose repetitive patterns eventually turn the invisible visible.
“My mark making is an organic process that makes energy possible. It’s like a crystal, forming bit by bit.” Minhas mixes color and then fixes dots on the canvas using a pen or a broken paintbrush, “like Seurat,” she says. She enjoys experimenting with how the dots are made. For instance, Minhas discovered an olive pick is an ideal dotmaking tool.
“When I’m mark making, making dots, and putting colors next to one another, the paint becomes the thread.” Minhas describes her body of work as a state of mind. It’s a reflection and a meditation. Her paintings tap nature’s behind-the-scenes synergy—a poetry inherently within and all around. A natural disaster, for instance, leaves a trail of grief, but in time nature regenerates and restores—similar to her own recovery from trauma.
There’s optimism unfolding in fresh flower buds, there are synchronous sand lines left ashore due to the moon and the earth’s magnetic field the night before. “There’s magic everywhere,” she explains. “It’s just marvelous. It
feels close to divinity.”
In previous bodies of work, Minhas has used ink on paper, acrylic on plaster, and paint on wood. However, there was something about the “push and pull of paint on canvas” that drew her toward the medium for the exhibition. The landscapes, their compositions and use of bold, happy colors, parallel Fauvist painters like Matisse, known for his whimsical color palette, expressive technique, and simplified forms. Minhas shares that she is also influenced by mystical, geometric Islamic, Sufi, and Aboriginal art, much of which she discovered in the books she read on loan from the “book man,” while her painted patterns aren’t too dissimilar from the labored designs of the textiles the “shawl man” sold.
Together, the experiences and influences of Minhas’s life so far weave a painterly tapestry described by their maker as producing “an oasis of calm.” Minhas is a storyteller; she doesn’t connect the dots but leaves enough space for a message and feeling to reveal themselves. Her paintings are textiles and poems.
When asked what Minhas hopes visitors to her show will take away, she says “I hope they feel the magic.”
—Christine Hildebrand
Tanya Minhas: A Tapestry of Dreams • Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York • September 18 to October 25 •
www.winstonwachter.com
