Founder of Minak Art studio
There is a particular kind of attention that comes from having once lived a very different life. Before she became an artist, Meenakshi Chatterjee spent years practising law, working within a world of deadlines, documents, decisions and carefully constructed arguments. Painting entered that life almost unexpectedly. One evening, after work, she walked into an art store, bought a canvas and some paints, and went home to begin. She did not know then that she was starting something that would eventually change the direction of her life.
Perhaps the impulse had been waiting much longer.
Some of Meenakshi’s earliest memories are of summer walks with her grandfather, who introduced her to flowers, gardening and the quiet patience of watching things grow. She remembers learning the names of flowers and noticing their seasons. These memories have remained remarkably present in her imagination. Years later, they return as water lilies, flowering trees, gardens and dense passages of foliage. What might appear at first as a fascination with landscape is, for Meenakshi , also a way of returning to a particular kind of childhood attention.
She paints the things she has learned to notice.
Working primarily in acrylic, Meenakshi approaches nature through colour, gesture and movement. Her paintings are built with visible brushstrokes that gather across the surface, sometimes dense and restless, sometimes opening into areas of quiet. Blues meet greens, yellows dissolve into violets, and occasional reds punctuate the landscape. Water becomes more than a reflective surface. It is constantly shifting, breaking apart and reforming through colour. Flowers are not merely botanical details. They become small, luminous interruptions within a larger field.
Her affinity with Impressionism is evident, particularly in her interest in light, atmosphere and the changing perception of a landscape. Yet what draws her to these ideas is deeply personal. She is interested in the fleeting nature of experience: the way sunlight changes within minutes, the way a garden looks different in another season, the way a place becomes altered once it has entered memory.
Travel has become an important part of this process of looking. Meenakshi seeks out places not simply to see them, but to understand what they have meant to other artists. Standing in Monet’s garden gave her a different relationship to the paintings she had known from books. To encounter the water, flowers and pathways that had once existed only as images was to see how intimately a painter’s world can become part of the work itself. Van Gogh, Matisse and David Hockney have each offered her different possibilities of colour and expression.
Hockney, in particular, entered her own story through an unexpectedly personal encounter. During a visit to London, she learned of his passing and later went to see his work. The experience remained with her. There was something moving about standing before paintings by an artist whose way of seeing had already travelled so far beyond him. For Meenakshi , these encounters have become part of the education of being an artist, an education that happens as much through travel and looking as it does through making.
Her curiosity is not limited to the history of painting. She is drawn to fashion, to the drama of fabric, colour, silhouette and craftsmanship. She travels with the same attentiveness. A museum, a garden, a street, a garment, a particular quality of light can all become visual information. There is an openness in this way of looking that is important to her practice. She does not seem interested in keeping art separate from life.These small encounters have the quiet narrative quality she admires in Vermeer, where nothing overtly dramatic may be happening, yet the stillness of the scene makes us wonder about the life beyond it.
The figures matter because Meenakshi is not really painting empty landscapes. She is painting lived moments.
This is also where her journey from law to art becomes more meaningful. Painting did not simply offer her a new profession. It changed her relationship with time. After years of working within a highly structured professional life, she found herself drawn towards things that cannot be controlled or hurried. Water moves at its own pace. Flowers open when they are ready. Light changes without asking permission. A painting takes time, and so does learning how to see.
There is something quietly rebellious about that shift.
Today, Meenakshi’s works from this space of observation and memory, while also building Minak Art Studio, a space she founded and designed herself. The studio extends her relationship with art beyond her own practice. She wants to create opportunities for artists who possess the commitment and ability to build meaningful practices but may not have access to galleries, professional networks or established platforms. Her background in law becomes useful here in an entirely different way. The discipline and practical knowledge applicable in law can now be used to help other artists navigate theirs.
Her life therefore contains an interesting continuity. The lawyer and the artist are not two separate identities. Both require patience, observation and an ability to notice what others might overlook. One works through language and structure. The other works through colour, gesture and silence.
Meenakshi’s paintings sit somewhere between what she has seen and what she remembers. A garden becomes more than a garden because it carries a childhood. Water becomes more than water because it holds light, movement and the memory of standing beside it. A person sitting beneath a tree becomes more than a figure because the scene suggests a moment that existed before we arrived and will continue after we leave.
That may be what keeps bringing her back to the canvas.
Not the need to preserve the world exactly as it is, but the desire to give certain moments enough attention that they do not disappear unnoticed.