Shena Parthab Taylor BSc, MA, PhD: About

I was born in the city of Ludhiana, located the heart of the Punjab to a young mother, aged  seventeen and a half years old, and to a young father not yet twenty-three!  My father was educated in the English fashion of British Public Schools, in The Doon School, in India and went on to become an officer in the Indian Navy, also having trained in a little place called England and in an even smaller place called Dartmouth.  My mother, Aneel, after her education in a convent run by English nuns, would go one to become a well-known model in Bombay, and who then became a fashion editor.

My husband has a saying he is fond of using:  “If  you want to make God laugh, you have only to tell him your plans” and so it has been for me throughout much of my life.

Shortly afterwards, at the age of circa 5, I was sent, for health reasons, to PCK Convent School in  the high country of Kordai Kanal, South India. There my beloved Nuns gave us drawing lessons and also gave us access to an abundance of trees and plant life across the gardens and high hills that we might draw and paint as a part of our schooling. It was that profundity of nature which my Nuns – with their inherent love of God and life – encouraged us all to feel, respect and try to share by drawing and painting. It was that love and respect which helped  embed painting and drawing in my very being; and I do not say the latter lightly. Whilst I was not always able to fulfil the desire to its fullest extent, the need to be creative never left me and throughout my life, the ability to find and express myself through creativity has been one of the foundations of my existence.

My early memory for art began at the age of about 4 years with, as with many children,  my colouring books and was also influenced by “growing things”; beginning with me wondering why my carefully arranged and nurtured mud balls – no seeds