About My Art:

Colours are a mystery to me. The universe is a mystery to me. Every living being. I find magic when colours mingle. When stars whisper their secrets. When eyes meet. I paint to share my joy of discovery. I do not paint this or this or that. I play with colours. With movement. With space. What emotions can I evoke? How share joy and pain and uncertainties? How be a child?

Milan Mathew
Past exhibitions: New York, Mumbai, Singapore, Luzern, Lausanne, Manila Upcoming: SwissArt Expo, August 21-25, Zurich.

About Me

To be fortunate in a world full of strife and poverty is a blessing. I am a very fortunate person. I live in a free country. The air I breath is clean. I have food, shelter, and clothing. I have colours. I have the earth and sky, and everything I need.

I was born in 1954 in a tiny and insignificant village in Kerala. My parents were barely literate. We lived in a mud hut with walls made of bamboo, with no doors or windows and no electricity. Till I was about nine, I had no umbrella and went to school in the pouring rain with only a banana leaf overhead. Till I was twelve, I had neither footwear, nor a pen, nor a single book to read.

All that changed in May 1966 when I was accepted to a missionary school five hundred miles from home. I was twelve when I was introduced to western literature, film, art, and music. At the mission school, I led a life of discipline and learning. I also discovered my talent as an artist and my love for books. It was in this school for the privileged few that I became aware of the Holocaust, the violence against the indigenous people of America, the tragedy of slavery and the horrors of war.

To be fortunate in a world full of strife and poverty is a blessing. I am a very fortunate person. I live in a free country. The air I breath is clean. I have food, shelter, and clothing. I have colors. I have the earth and sky, and everything I need.

I spent my early childhood in an insignificant village in Kerala, South India. My parents were barely literate. We lived in a simple home, with no doors, no windows and no electricity. Till I was twelve, I had neither footwear, nor a pen, nor a single book to read. But I was lucky and could study in an English school, free, five hundred miles from home.

At the age of 18 I joined Jyoti Sahi, a renowned Indian artist living outside the city of Bangalore as his sole apprentice. My life as a freelance artist under his guidance paved the way to three successive scholarships, which took me first to Singapore, later to Southern Philippines and finally to Munich, Germany. In 1981 I was awarded a generous scholarship of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) of Germany. I enrolled to study Film Direction at the Munich Film Academy (HFF).

After completing my studies in 1987, I migrated to Switzerland. In 1990 I joined Swiss National Television as a redactor for feature films. Between 1985 and 1990 I was a member of the OCIC and Third World Film Juries of Berlin and Mannheim, and in 1988 president of the Ecumenical Jury in Locarno. In December 2013 I retired early to pursue my passions: art, literature, and film. My ‘autobiography’ Kleine Rose written between 2013 and 2018 won an award of the University of Zurich. (Online at www.meet-my-lfe.net).

My understanding of art has changed over the years. I do not wish to illustrate or design and surely not reproduce. I wish to paint as truthfully and as playfully as a child would, painting for pleasure, for my own happiness. I believe in the power of light and colour, in movement, in harmony that is born from chaos. I know I am, as we all are, a child of the universe. I am a creator. Standing before an empty canvass, I whisper to myself: Let there be light.

Milan Mathew

WELCOME TO MY WORLD:

PAINTINGS

My art is a journey of discovery. I believe true art is an act of creation. It exalts me to imagine a world no one has ever seen. Creation is not always joyous. I am often filled with doubt and anguish. I play with colours. I also fight with colours. With forms, spaces and motion.I ask myself, how express joy or pain or despair? How radiate, how share a sense of hope? Above all, how quench my quest for wonder?

NUDES

The human body, also the mind, fascinates me. The more I look at a person, the more I wish to transcend form. I derive no pleasure in being reproductive or capturing an exact image of the person (or the landscape) before me. I look for movement, for harmony, for light. I search for godliness.

Poetry

In my writings, I wrestle with emotions. The world is chaotic, violent, often unjust. I envy those who forget, those who can ignore darkness, misery and strife. In my poems I express the anguish and the loneliness I feel, my helplessness, sometimes my bitterness.

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