For the 12-year-old Meghana Basi, wielding the brush has been as simple as holding the tooth brush since she was three. The strokes come with so much ease for her that even complex abstract paintings are finished in a couple of hours.
Meghana Basi, considered a child prodigy, is going to eighth grade in Coakley Middle School in Norwood (Massachusetts) near Boston, U.S. Her father Ramesh Basi hails from Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh and mother Binu Gopinathan is from Kollam in Kerala. On a vacation to India, little Meghana shared her ideas and future aspirations with The Hindu .
It was at the tender age of three that Meghana first took the colour palette to paint a sequence of colours and in different combinations. At eight, she made her first painting on a canvas as big as 24” x 30”, that too a three-dimensional image. The intricate emotions reflected in all her paintings appear too mature for her age, but she says just this: “My expressions are reflected on the canvas and I don’t sit and think of anything before I take the brush”. Her abstract paintings on women are a class apart. That typical ‘Indian look’ in the paintings has left many among the Indian diaspora awestruck, who turned out in large numbers to buy her works.
Cause of women
Little Meghana is a volunteer along with her mother in Saheli (saheliboston.org), a voluntary organisation working towards the empowerment of South Asian women, especially in areas like mental health, emotional wellbeing, domestic violence, abuse, and depression. On knowing of Saheli’s activities, Meghana made a painting titled ‘Abused’ and presented it to the organisation. She also worked as a volunteer in Sunrise Old Age Home for two years.
Her first commercial exploration also started after she partnered with Saheli, with which she shares 50 p.c. of the amount received as sale proceeds of her paintings. Apart from placing her paintings for sale at www.etsy.com, she also has a company ‘Meghartz’ founded in her name and has sold over 25 paintings so far. Her father Ramesh is in consultation will art galleries and connoisseurs to conduct an exhibition of her paintings in Bengaluru before rounding off her vacation in a month.
