“IT WAS A BOLD STEP TO [GO TO SPAIN TO STUDY ART IN MY 40S] AND I QUESTIONED MYSELF ABOUT IT THROUGHOUT”

—SHEFALI SHAH

LIFE OF LEARNING

Her decision to move to Barcelona was not aimless or arbitrary. Shefali thought out her decision very well, including not only logistics in her planning, but also the emotions she might feel at the reality of being a student all over again. When she researched art courses online, she came across a three-four month residency programme at Metàfora in Barcelona, and picked that one.

Her lack of previous formal training worried her, of course. “I’m not a student of art; I don’t know my work really well. I was actually going there as a raw canvas and I was anxious, concerned and worried,” she says. “It was a bold step and I questioned myself about it throughout. But I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn not only art, but how to budget my stay, my living and daily expenses, how to be on my own.”

As it turned out, Shefali as a student in her forties was very much like Shefali as a student in her teens. “I was a backbencher and would pass out in the art history classes,” she giggles.

But, Shefali the mother remained Shefali the mother. Since her kids, Aryaman, 19, and Maurya, 18, had been schooling in Spain because of their passion for soccer, she met them as often as she could, sometimes even popping into their apartment on campus to cook them maa ke haath ka khaana.

“They were in Salou, and they had Saturdays off, so they’d meet me in Barcelona and stay until Sunday evening,” recalls Shefali. “We were able to spend a lot of time outside of our comfort zone and that was a different feeling. But I had to feed them when I could!”

HEART TALK

Shefali’s art, somehow, has always been tied with her kids. She began painting as a hobby when she enrolled her kids for art classes and realised she was so interested in what they were doing that she had no option but to join them in class. After that, she painted sporadically till she decided to head for Barcelona.

But even before she went to Barcelona, she was more than a hobbyist at her art. “Someone put my work across to an NGO group called Art for Concern that was holding an exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai,” Shefali remembers. “Just the thought that my canvas would