What Shailee Mehta Sees
The first thing you notice about Shailee Mehta's paintings is the water. The second thing you notice is that nobody in them is performing for anyone.
Edge Effect, 2026
The women in her canvases: large, ambitious, sometimes spanning entire walls are submerged, floating, moving through water with the specific quality of people who don't know they're being watched. Because in Shailee's world, they aren't. The male gaze, the one that prioritises ownership, perfection, and control, has been deliberately, consciously excluded. What's left in its place is something rarer and more interesting: a language for the female gaze. Wildness in body and landscape. Bareness and vulnerability. The kind of presence that has nothing to prove and everything to say.
Water arrived slowly. It started with a walk along the Mumbai shoreline during low tide, a close observation of how the sea sculpts a landscape and nourishes an ecology almost invisible to the naked eye. The parallels between the feminine and water, the primordial soup, became a point of investigation. The images that emerged from that investigation became her most recent body of work: first at Indigo+Madder in London, then, earlier this year, at Chemould CoLab in Mumbai, a four-month residency that culminated in her debut solo in India.
"There is nothing quite like the feeling of returning home," she says about the Chemould show. "It was heartwarming to share the entire process of making this solo with people who visited during the open studios. It allowed me to introduce my practice to the Indian audience in its entirety, rather than just the final product."
My Mother Told Me Never To Cut My Nails At Night, 2020
The scale is not incidental. The canvases are large; sometimes the length of a body or a gesture extends across an entire wall, and that size is doing specific work. It claims space, literally and metaphorically. It holds the artist's movement in the act of making and asks the viewer to move back and forth to take in the whole image. Large canvases are also, she says, wonderful terrains for play: one image becomes an index for several co-existing worlds.
The palette is another kind of language. It started as a way to approach figures with an otherworldliness, a nod to the mythologised nude, but has become more intuitive over time, derived from the specific landscapes she's considering. 'Into the Low Tide', her London show, draws its vibrant palette from bioluminescence. The glow you see in her figures isn't decorative. It's ecological.
The process begins in a sketchbook, sometimes with words rather than drawings, and moves through layers: an orange or purple underpainting that dictates the eventual radiance of the figure, then a gradual build, then the final harmonising pass where glazing techniques push something back or bring something forward. She keeps several paintings in progress simultaneously, a trick, she admits, to save herself from hyper-fixating on the puzzles she's struggling to resolve in a single work. "When you know, you know," she says about the moment a painting is finished. Knowing when it isn't working is the harder skill and the one she's spent years learning to trust. When her eye isn't moving fluidly around the canvas, she knows the composition needs attention: more, or less, or simply listening to what the painting wants to become.
The Ripening, 2026
The paintings are self-portraits, in a sense. She uses herself as a reference in many works, and some faces hold a particular resemblance. But there is also a process of mythologising that takes the work a step beyond representation, towards a portrait of femininity itself, embodied as curiosity, surrender, collective care, or ferocity depending on the painting and the day.
Under The Swell, 2025
The work that surprised her most recently was 'Under the Swell' which featured floating and submerged bodies at a scale she was seeing her figures in water for the first time. "The way water naturally lends itself to abstraction and refraction was a fantastic learning curve as a painter." Another was 'While the Forest Soughs', a painting whose sand-casted metallic frame became an extension of the work itself; the materiality of the surround integrated with the image in a way she hadn't attempted before. A portal, she calls it, that is yet to lead her to new territories.
The painters who live in her head while she's working: Artemisia Gentileschi, Joaquín Sorolla, Paula Rego, Bhupen Khakhar, Sosa Joseph, Anthony Cudahy, Eva Padе. Painters who, she says, can pull you into their worlds with utmost ease and gently push you out, reminding you, just at the right moment, that you are witnessing a painting.
Recognition is building, and she's aware of it, careful about it. "I hope it doesn't change anything," she says. The anchors that keep the practice grounded are specific: peers who have seen her grow from the beginning, conversations with mentors that have struck a chord, and an intuition that has been slowly building over years of actual work.
When asked if there is something about the paintings that hasn't been understood yet, something she's waiting for someone to notice, she turns the question around. "I feel there is a lot about my practice that I am yet to discover and bring to the foreground." The brass-casted frames opened a portal. She is following it. She is also, she says, eager to unravel new languages of painting for the female gaze that de-centre the figure itself, abstracted narratives, new territory, the work she hasn't made yet.
This month, she leaves for Oxford. The Ruskin School of Art, an MFA, a peer-led environment she's been craving. "I was starting to feel the need to put the practice through another round of churning," she says. The timing felt right.
A good studio day, in the meantime, starts early with coffee, straight into painting without much analysis, a delicious lunch, a research spiral, fresh references, back to painting. Rigorous. A series of tiny decisions that go on to define the entire work. The slow burn, she says, is what's so appealing about the medium.
The women in her paintings exist entirely for themselves: uninhibited, unobserved, alive in a world the painter built specifically to hold them. Shailee Mehta, it turns out, is doing the same thing.
