Deepa's Family

Deepa is artist Madhvi Parekh’s second daughter, and when she was born, her mother’s gift to her in their cramped living quarters was a world of fantasy and imagination in which all the natural world was one’s friend. An unschooled artist, Parekh drew on her childhood memories of life in a Gujarati village where nature formed part of it. Birds and beings, fish and things, trees and fields were part of an organic togetherness and co-existence was natural. Using the stylistic technique of traditional embroidery, Parekh fills the canvas with creatures great and small, caring neither for perspective, nor scale, imagining the world for her child, but also imagining it as the child might see it—a place at once familiar and unfamiliar but without any sense of threat or danger, simply a beautiful place to discover in the company of friends.