People, animal and things from her life appear in her paintings. She liked the shape of the windows she bought for her new house and painted
windows looking into mystery spaces. In Bombay, she painted in the balcony of her home, where a crow would often visit. She painted the crow
into several of her works. Now that she has grandchildren, she paints their faces. She also paints the faces of children in her basti or neighbourhood of
Nizamuddin, Delhi where her studio is located.
The celebrated painter M.F. Husain took her under his wing and
organized her first exhibition in a Delhi garden. He later introduced her to
art circles in Mumbai, orchestrating and promoting her work in this period
— the late 50s and early 60s — which was characterized by a youthful verve
and assimilation of many obvious influences. From Husain, the young
Anjolie learnt to carry a small bag of paints and brushes, to sit on the floor
and work in any available space. These traits were to stand her in good
stead in the years ahead, where a peripatetic lifestyle and constant travels
denied her the luxury of a studio. Anjolie went to New York in 1959, a visit
which had a profound and lasting impact on her exposure to and
understanding of art. Upon her return from New York, she won a
scholarship at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris spurning offers of
admission at the Slade School of Art in London. Enrolling at Ecole des
Beaux Arts in 1959, she subsisted on a modest stipend provided by the
French Government. Financial hardship combined with the stringent
discipline at the institution under the most feared but respected professors
were the first taste of discipline and criticism for the young painter, flushed
with the early accolades showered on her in India. Paris to her was a rude
shock as he met hundreds of seemingly more talented young people and to
her consternation found glaring gaps in her base of knowledge. She
suffered a terrible loss of confidence in the first year in Paris, struggling
with the language and isolation. But imbued with fierce determination and
what she now calls the very typically Indian “exam syndrome”, she
persevered, working long hours to compete with local and international
students at the Atelier Fresque. She not only retained the scholarship but
graduated with “Premier Mention”. At the end of her apprenticeship in
Paris, she emerged as a fully trained “Fresquist”. Unfortunately on her
return to India she was never commissioned to do a real fresco because of
the extended time frame required to complete one and no one was ever
willing to wait that long. However, with the skills she had acquired, she
soon gained a reputation as a muralist and has over the years crafted no less
than 17 large murals in a variety of media including fibre-glass.
Moving on to her paintings in the late 1970s, there was often more than a
hint of tragedy, which seemed a resurrection of the grief that remained
suppressed after the death of her father in 1976. The empty chair in her
paintings became a powerful manifestation of her mourning. She achieves a
moving poignancy in the fold of the fabric, the chair that will be occupied at
the moment of seeing, the protagonist who is poised to but may never enter
the painting. Paradoxically, in the aftermath of her bereavement, the 1976-82 period proved to be a prolific
one for Anjolie. She held five exhibitions in Mumbai, one in Delhi, two in the USA. It was after the Delhi
show of 1978 that Anjolie began to become almost a cult figure in terms of public attention. Her skill
combined with distinctive techniques with a natural empathy for colour, leading to a magical quality of tint
and surface for which she is celebrated.