WHAT REMAINS
When Deepa Sharma returned to painting, her life had already been shaped by Nigeria, India, England and Switzerland. A short biography can only hint at those years, when family and everyday life set the rhythm. In this interview with AH Magazine, she talks about the people she observes along the Rhine, the landscapes shaped by memory and imagination, and the space she deliberately leaves open within an image.
You made your first painting at the age of five, but did not return to painting seriously until much later. A short biography says very little about the years in between. How would you tell that story yourself?
I was born in Lagos, Nigeria, where my father worked for an Indian company. As far back as I can remember, I was drawn to colour and nature. Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always the same: I wanted to paint and to be an artist.
When I was eight, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and life changed very suddenly. We moved to India for her treatment, and in all the upheaval that followed, art gradually slipped into the background. I went on to follow a more conventional path and eventually earned a degree in Accounting and Taxation.
After I married, I moved to England, where I lived for nine years and had my first child. We later returned to India, and for many years my life was centred on raising my family. My second child was born there, and although I wasn’t painting, that love for it never really went away. It was always somewhere in the background.
My husband began working in Basel in 2018, and I eventually joined him in Switzerland in 2023, after my eldest left for university. That move came at a very particular point in my life. I found myself taking stock and thinking about what I wanted the next chapter to hold, not only in terms of family life, but also in terms of what I wanted for myself.
Painting was the thing I kept coming back to. In early 2025, I finally decided to give it a real chance and see where it might take me.
Watercolour had always been the medium I was most drawn to. I love its transparency and the way water and pigment can create something you can never fully plan. I think of watercolour as a three-way collaboration between the artist, water and pigment. Magic happens when all three begin to speak the same language.
Looking back, I don’t really see my return to painting as the beginning of something new. It feels much more like finding my way back to something that had always been a part of me.
In the caption accompanying People Watching, you distinguish between the “inner landscapes and quiet psychological transitions” of your earlier work and a gaze turned outward, towards the lived experience of a place. What prompted that outward turn, and what began to hold your attention in the people and places around you?
The outward turn happened quite naturally during a group exhibition in Basel, around the time of Art Basel, when the city welcomes visitors from all over the world. I met many people through the exhibition and spent quite a lot of time outside the gallery, particularly along the Rhine promenade. There are wonderful places by the river where you can sit beneath the trees and simply watch life unfold around you.
I’m quite a private and somewhat introverted person, and my work usually comes from looking inward, from introspection and from trying to articulate emotions I have experienced myself. Although those experiences are personal, I think the emotions within them are universal. The circumstances that give rise to them may differ from person to person, but we all experience feelings such as uncertainty, longing, stillness or hope in different ways and to different degrees.
Sitting by the Rhine shifted my attention for a while towards what was happening around me. I became interested in those ordinary, fleeting moments we often pass without really noticing: someone sitting quietly by the river, a cyclist passing through, two people sharing a table. It wasn’t necessarily the individual people that interested me, but how they existed within the atmosphere of a place: the light, the breeze, the shade of the trees, the architecture, the movement of the river.
That period of observation gave rise to People Watching and A Table for Two. I enjoyed turning my gaze outward and allowing myself to simply observe. But after the exhibition, I found myself naturally turning inward again, and one of the works that followed was Solitude.
I think that experience helped me understand a distinction within my own practice. When I paint what I observe around me, I am often capturing a fleeting moment that has caught my attention. When I turn inward, I am trying to translate emotions that can linger long after the events that gave rise to them have passed. Both interest me, but those inner landscapes are ultimately the ones I feel most compelled to return to.
In A Table for Two and People Watching, we meet people whose stories we do not know. How much do you actually know about them, and how much of their story begins in your imagination once they become part of the painting?
Very little, actually, and I think that is part of what interested me. The people in People Watching and A Table for Two were strangers who happened to cross my field of vision for a brief moment. I didn’t know who they were, where they had come from or what was happening in their lives.
In People Watching, I found myself wondering about the woman gazing into the distance across the Rhine. What was she thinking about? Was she waiting for someone, reflecting on something or simply enjoying a quiet moment by the river? There was also the cyclist passing through, and I wondered where he might be going next. But I never felt the need to invent definite answers to those questions. I think the not knowing was part of what made the scene interesting to me.
A Table for Two began in a similar way. I knew nothing about the two people or the conversation they might have been having. What caught my attention was the scene as a whole: the sunlight falling across them, their softer silhouettes against the harder, more geometric forms of the surrounding architecture, and the quiet intimacy of two people sharing a moment.
So I don’t really create elaborate stories for the people I observe. My imagination comes into it more through the feeling I take away from the scene. I might wonder about them, but I prefer to leave their stories open. There is something quite beautiful and compelling about witnessing a small moment in someone else’s life without needing to know everything about it. In a way, that openness also leaves room for the viewer to bring their own story to the painting.
You have described Filtered Through Time as, in a way, a conversation with your father, and written that details fade over time while feelings remain. How did something so personal find its form in landscape?
For me, any painting begins with colour. With Filtered Through Time I, I knew I wanted to work with golds, browns and sepia tones, colours that already carried a certain warmth and a sense of time and age for me. I didn’t begin the painting intending to make something about my father.
But somewhere in the process of painting it, I began thinking about him. I lost him many years ago, and I found myself thinking about all the conversations I never got to have with him. I wondered what he would think of me returning to art after all these years and of the artist I am becoming now.
That was really where Filtered Through Time began to shift into something much more personal.
Landscape felt like a natural language for those thoughts. I wasn’t interested in illustrating a particular memory or place we had shared. Instead, the landscapes became emotional spaces. Over time, the details of our memories begin to soften. Places, moments and sequences become less precise, yet the feelings attached to them can remain incredibly vivid. These works became studies of the landscapes of memory and how they age with us.
Watercolour seemed particularly suited to that idea. Forms emerge and dissolve, edges soften, and one layer remains visible through another. It felt very close to the way memory works for me. Fragments surface, recede and blur into one another.
So, when I describe the series as a conversation with my father, perhaps it is a conversation I am having through painting, one that I didn’t get the chance to have with him in life.
You have said that, rather than reproduce a scene exactly as it appears, you try to capture its essence. When you turn an observed scene into a painting, what do you feel needs to remain, and what can be left out?
A lot of my landscapes are actually imagined. They may begin with something I have seen or a place I have visited, but by the time I paint them, they have already started to become something else in my mind. I’m not necessarily trying to return to that particular place. I’m holding on to an impression of it, perhaps an atmosphere or simply a feeling.
What needs to remain is whatever made me stop and look in the first place, or what stayed with me afterwards. Very often, that begins with colour, as I mentioned earlier. A particular relationship between colours, a shift in light or an atmosphere can be much more important to me than reproducing every tree, branch or detail exactly as it appeared.
When I begin painting, I tend to simplify. I ask myself what is actually necessary for the feeling of the landscape to remain. Details that don’t contribute to that can disappear. A tree might become simply a shape or a value, foliage might dissolve into washes, and entire elements can be left out if they distract from what I am trying to convey.
I think leaving things out is just as important as deciding what to put in. Watercolour lends itself beautifully to this because it allows areas to remain unresolved, and it can also take a painting in a direction I hadn’t necessarily planned. I like giving the viewer enough information to enter the landscape, but not so much that everything has already been decided for them.
The Mirage and Swept Away, for example, both evolved as I laid down the washes. I responded to the way the white of the paper showed through the colour and to the way the pinks and violets moved across the surface. I intentionally kept some of the harder edges created by those washes because they brought a sense of movement to the compositions.
Similarly, when I began the Lavender Breeze series, I wasn’t interested in describing individual lavender flowers in detail. The lavender became almost symbolic. What I really wanted to capture was the feeling of the flowers moving in the breeze and the sense of quiet comfort within that moment.
So, for me, capturing the essence of a place isn’t really about describing it accurately. It is about preserving the colour, light, atmosphere and feeling that made it worth remembering, then allowing memory and imagination to take it somewhere new.
Looking beyond your next painting, is there a project, body of work or direction you would particularly like to pursue but have not yet had the opportunity to explore?
I don’t tend to plan my work too far ahead, and I’ve realised I work better that way. I prefer to keep a sense of openness in the process rather than fixing the outcome in advance. Often, something begins to emerge quite intuitively, and I follow that direction as it develops.
As for a particular project or body of work I would like to explore, I don’t have a fixed idea at the moment. I think it will have to reveal itself naturally. Sometimes one painting leads to another, and before I realise it, a conversation between the works begins and a series starts to emerge.
I want to continue allowing my work to evolve in that way. Part of what I enjoy about painting is not always knowing where it will lead next and remaining open to new subjects, ideas and ways of working. That is perhaps quite ironic because, in my life outside painting, I’m very much someone who likes to have a Plan A and a Plan B and to know where things are heading. Painting seems to be the one place where I’m comfortable letting go of that need to always know the outcome.
When she paints, Deepa Sharma simplifies the scene. A tree may become a shape or a tonal value, foliage dissolves into watercolour washes, and other elements fall away entirely. The stories of the people she observes remain open, while her landscapes retain the colour, light, atmosphere and feeling that first made her stop and look. She gives the viewer enough to enter the image, leaving room for their own response.
Deepa Sharma | INSTAGRAM
