Confessions of a millennial, painted by Hemali Vadalia

If you’ve ever opened Instagram and seen a ‘Starry Night’ postcard taped to a dorm wall, you know Vincent van Gogh’s ghost still haunts Gen Z and millennials alike. He is the artist you turn to when you want to declare, quietly but firmly, that you feel things. So, it makes sense that when the immersive animated film Loving Vincent (where hand-painted frames make up every shot) came out in 2017, Hemali Vadalia’s fingerprints were on it. And while she’s ambivalent about the commercialisation, the project was a reminder that Vadalia is comfortable in many mediums—water colours, animation, film, and now, oil painting.

“Animation is still a powerful medium,” she admits. “But painting has its own strength to stand alone. I wanted to grasp those skills, to be able to paint something magnificent even if it was just for my own walls.” That desire has now bloomed into her first major solo exhibition, Where the Light Falls Gently, at Subcontinent, Mumbai.

The 40-year-old artist grew up in Mulund in suburban Mumbai, always making things. “I’ve always been painting, always making craft, always drawing birds,” she says. But like many Indian kids, art was not the path she was expected to take. She studied Engineering before signing up to study Animation at IIT Bombay. Painting stayed in the background. “I never thought this was something I could do full-time. I got serious only after 35.”

In 2013 she went to Florence for eight months, sampling ateliers and sketching in museums. “I had absolutely no art background then,” she says. “But when you are in Florence, surrounded by art and architecture, something shifts. I saw old master paintings for the first time and it moved me very deeply. I wanted to learn the skills to do this, even if it was only for my own walls.”

That decision took her to New York on a scholarship, to the Grand Central Atelier, where she trained for three years. Atelier training gave her discipline but also limits. “I started looking at Impressionists and Fauvists—Matisse, Gauguin. I looked at Goya for composition, Rodin for sculpture, Käthe Kollwitz for printmaking. I wanted a more joyful palette.”

The result is a body of work that feels rooted in history but alive to the present, serious in craft but playful in subject. A kombucha bottle painted with the reverence of a Dutch still life. A millennial woman painted like a reclining Venus but watching movies instead of waiting for a lover. Plants growing not in van Gogh’s fields but on a Mumbai windowsill.

Much of the exhibition comes out of her memory and experience. ‘Stargazers’, for instance, recalls a trip she once took with friends from her IT job to Vangani. “It’s a place with very little light pollution. We were lying on the ground watching the stars move, the shooting stars. You feel really insignificant in front of the universe. I thought, this will make a good picture.” The painting is both personal record and universal image, a reminder of what it is to pause and look up.

Some of her other works emerged directly from her illness. In 2022, Vadalia was diagnosed with cancer. Surgery and treatment left her with lymphedema, a condition that causes limbs to swell up and requires hours of daily care. ‘Elevation’, at first glance, could pass for a regular Saturday-night scene, the kind of image we all recognise: someone stretched out on the bed, legs propped up, casually watching a video. But for Vadalia it holds a different weight. “Thrice a day I was supposed to elevate my legs,” she explains. “Suddenly you are told these are the things you have to do. Five or six hours a day you are just managing your symptoms.” What looks ordinary on the canvas is, in fact, a record of her daily routine of recovery, turned into art.

‘Face Mask’, on the other hand, is more playful and instantly relatable. Inspired by a moment in a friend’s New York apartment, it shows Vadalia in the middle of her nightly routine with a face mask on, stepping out of the bathroom when she hears her phone ring. “My friend clicked a photo of me then,” she says. “I had just enough hair to finally tie into a little pony, and she did it for me.” The image captures that in-between state—recovery—but also the ordinary millennial ritual of skincare mixed with distraction, when you are half in self-care mode and half answering calls. For Vadalia, it holds something more private, the joy of hair returning and of feeling like herself again.

Then there is ‘Projector Girl’, which might be the most telling work in the show. Vadalia lies in her room watching a film projected on the wall, her body arranged in a pose borrowed from Giorgione’s ‘Sleeping Venus’. “That painting was originally a male gaze,” she says. “Here, it’s me painting myself the way I want to be shown. Relaxed, cosy, in my room. It’s referencing history, but on my terms.” The plants on the windowsill nod to her current identity as a plant mom. “Two years ago, I started planting vegetables in my window box. Harvesting your own food is such a calming, soothing experience.” In her canvases, karela blossoms are painted with as much gravity as human figures. Even a still life of tindli becomes significant. “When I haven’t painted in weeks, I start with still life. So, I painted tindli, just something lying around at home.”

Subcontinent itself is a relatively new player in Mumbai’s art scene, opened in March this year by curators Dhwani Gudka and Keshav Mahendru. Their focus, as Mahendru puts it, is “looking at how artists of the last 40 or 50 years and contemporary artists are dealing with the larger art history of the Subcontinent”.

Put together, the exhibition feels like a series of diary entries. “Sometimes we want to be witnessed,” Vadalia says. “Like the way we share images on social media. For me, painting is that too.”

The title, Where the Light Falls Gently, captures the mood. The works are not loud, not monumental. They let light brush across ordinary things until they gleam. In an age when much of millennial life is documented in selfies and social media posts, Vadalia offers an alternative archive. “These are beautiful moments that cost nothing,” she says. “Looking at the stars, flowering plants, simple pleasures... We’ve lost contact with that in this fast-paced world. I wanted to take a moment to go back.”

Hemali Vadalia: Where The Light Falls Gently is on view at Subcontinent in Mumbai till September 13