Little did Mrinalini Singh know her squiggles on the back pages of notebooks to fill the boredom of school would lead to a serious hobby of painting that one day would win her recognition as an artist. It was an eventful journey of many years.

Born in Shimla in snowy northern India, she enjoyed art classes in school. Her father was in the army and frequently on the move. “My childhood impressions are marked by a sense of loss,” she recalls. “I lost touch with my friends in every transfer. Make new friends with each fresh beginning, meet new people and lose them again – it became a rule. But every change also opened a new world to enrich my experience.”

She attended school in Lucknow and college in Calcutta. She got married just six months before final examinations and completed her degrees in history and political science 10 years later from University of Delhi. Her husband, Hemant Krishan Singh, Indian ambassador to Indonesia, is a diplomat with a career that keeps him hopping. Apart from stints in India, they have lived in Portugal, Mozambique, USA, Nepal, former Yugoslavia, Switzerland and Colombia before arriving in Indonesia early this year.

Home, she says, is wherever she’s living, in each place she’s been active in efforts to benefit the disabled and downtrodden. As a president of the diplomatic women’s association of Colombia she was instrumental in setting up charity homes in Bogota. She refuses to be typecast. “I am beyond set ideas and fixed mindsets,” she asserts.

She rediscovered herself in the early ’90s with a reborn passion for art. Her first exhibition of watercolours in 1992 in New Delhi gave her confidence. Further, she painted botanical illustrations in watercolours. Now she paints flowers, which she perceives as an opportunity to fill the canvas with energy, passion, beauty; love and spontaneity.

In her youth, she’d wanted to join Shanti Niketan, the renowned art school founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Though she didn’t, he remains her inspiration. “Tagore is my guiding light, mentor and inspiration. I admire his ease with words and brush,” she says. “He had a worldly outlook and always spoke a universal language. He was a great voyager when travel was difficult and uncommon. The circumstances in my life have provided me an opportunity to see the world and to stimulate my creative spirit. I too aspire to speak the universal language of fine art, where the artist remains silent. Art is a channel that connects to my inner self, the means of self-discovery leading me through my spiritual growth. It’s an essential tool for my inner journey.”

During her three years in Colombia she met Armando Villegas, one of Latin America’s leading contemporary artists. Working with him in his studio helped her develop her skills.

She also studied psychometry, the metaphysical science of analysing people through their choice of flowers. Now she explores every energy-related therapy and believes in synchronicity, where the coincidences in life are linked with significant connotations.

Mrinalini means lotus and she signs her paintings with a lotus symbol. She dreamed of a lotus with a yellow aura just before her last exhibition in Bogota and painted that vision. That canvas is now a most precious possession. She relates the structure of flowers to the Mandala, a cosmic symbol used since ancient times to carry positive energies.

She participated in a group exhibition in Gallery Lingar in Kemang and a solo show in Koi Gallery. She has tried her hand at sculpting in recent months under the guidance of Dolorosa Sinaga. She is also taking lessons in human drawing from Teguh Ostenrik.

Besides Hindi and English, she speaks French, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish. She plays golf and tennis and is eager to try her fingers on guitar. During a two-year stint in journalism, she contributed articles on travel to a newspaper. She also makes quilts with striking designs. She has a dream of having her own gallery. Her son Kunal, 25, and daughter Diva, 23, are busy developing their careers in the financial world of New York.

Her eclectic home displays objects d’ art she has collected over the years. However, she says she could easily detach herself from everything and, with just a canvas, paints and brush, leave for Timbuktu.

Published in Indonesia Tattler, Sept. 2003