Meghali works on her painting at Bharatiya Nritya Kala Mandir on Monday while daughter Shivangi looks on. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Meghali Goswami, originally from Shillong, has taken to painting to express her feelings and portray the mother-daughter relationship.

An art faculty at Kala Bhavana (Visva-Bharati), Santiniketan, 39-year-old Goswami has been painting since she was a child.

If people take to cooking or making gifts for making people close to them feel special, Goswami does it through the medium of art and her painting. She pursues her passion as a means of pleasing her daughter, 11-year-old Shivangi.

Speaking to The Telegraph on the sidelines of the five-day national arts camp in Patna, she said her art focuses on the mother-daughter relationship.

The art is a way to make her daughter, a Class VII student, feel special.

Goswami, a fine arts alumnus of Guwahati Art College, was in Patna to attend the national arts camp organised by the art, culture and youth affairs department at Bharatiya Nritya Kala Mandir. It concluded on Monday.

One of the paintings she has worked on at the camp has a mix of bold and vibrant colours to showcase life’s different experiences.

The painting shows a figure handling different responsibilities, while a guardian angel protects the person from a corner.

She said: “I have focused on the mother-daughter relationship in the painting. With the bold and vibrant colours, I have tried to show what life is about and the bitter and sweet experiences in my own life.

“I have tried to showcase the joy and happiness of life through the bold colours, while warm colours, including black, show the negative aspects of life,” she added.

Goswami, who has raised Shivangi on her own, said life was a mixed bag of experiences. Along with her daughter, these experiences prompted her in the painting.

She added: “My daughter is everything to me and I try to please her through my paintings. On several occasions, I have been away from her for long durations, unable to meet her. I have spoken to her on the phone and my conversations with her are reflected in my paintings.”

Shivangi grew up with her grandmother in Guwahati for quite a few years, while Goswami was pursuing her PhD in Roorkee.

One of the occasions when Goswami was away from her daughter was her days in IIT-Roorkee. The institute started a PhD programme in its humanities department in the early 2000s. From 2003-2007, she did her research on art and aesthetics in architecture. Her topic was Mughal architecture: A case study of Fatehpur Sikri motifs.

Her book on Aesthetics of the Time: A View of Fatehpur Sikri Motifs has also been released. Now, at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan (Bengal), Goswami has donned the robes of a guide for research scholars.

The university, founded by Rabindranath Tagore, has over the years produced a celebrated list of alumni that includes Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, art critic R. Siva Kumar and filmmaker late Satyajit Ray to name a few.