Catching Up With Artist Lisa Maria

Artist Lisa Maria is also a certified yoga teacher. She calls herself a Fauji brat, since she grew up around the armed forces. As a child, her parents always encouraged her to pursue her passion. She graduated from the Delhi College of Arts in 1996, and got married shortly thereafter.

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A working mom, Lisa Maria has two daughters, aged 12 and 14. Art, she says, has always come very naturally to her. For the first 15 years or so after college, she worked mainly with oil on canvas, and pencil and charcoal sketches on paper. These were mainly human figures, landscapes and portraits, she says.

Lisa Maria Kaul's art

She describes her style as realistic, and would usually take photographs and recreate them on canvas. This was at a time when her daughters were still younger. She used to paint while her daughters were at school, and at night after dinner.

“I was getting tired of the work I was doing,...all the detail in anatomy, each precise line and proportion, I wanted to do something light and easy…something that would express my feelings more." The art continued the same way till 2015 when I made my first series of abstract art called, 'Blurred lights'.

She soon progressed to making small size minimalistic drawings (pen on paper). The first series are drawings based on her teenage years in Delhi, the rest are just other moments from her life. She said she has dropped technical details with her new style of drawing, and aims to use pen and paper to create narratives and evoke emotions in the viewer.

An animal lover, Lisa Maria says that she has grown up in a household of pet lovers and at one point she had seven cats!

Lisa Maria, who spent a large part of her life in Delhi, moved to Nagpur last year. She said impressionism has influenced her art a lot and her favourite Indian artists are Subodh Gupta and Amrita Sher-Gil. Her daughters let her paint for hours on end, and in fact her younger daughter is even more of a natural artist than she is.

Pen and Pastel on Paper

“In my opinion, people feel the need to get back to the simple things in life and I think that is what they relate to when they view my art. Art should nourish your soul and that is what I aim to do with my work.”