On November 24, Amol Palekar turns 70 and he raises a toast to the occasion with a solo exhibition of abstracts on oil in a Mumbai gallery. Talking to Mirror from Pune, Amol says that though his acting career and its success overshadowed everything else, the fact remains that he was a painter much before he became an actor and hopes to die as one.

After graduating from the JJ School of Arts in 1965, he started his creative journey with his first solo exhibition two years later and had hosted seven such exhibitions till 1982. “I moved from the visual to performing arts and then to plastic art and now it's back to the first as the circle gets complete,“ he muses, recalling how excited he was when he entered theatre because it not only offered all the elements of the visual arts like colour, texture, form and space, but also new elements-sounds and a live performance. “Not many are aware that I was one of the leading per formers who brought theatre out of the proscenium arch and explored new spaces.” Looking at the installations today he points out that even the visual arts has evolved to encompass group activity, performing arts and creative use of locations. “The contours and boundaries are blurring as we move from one art form to another. Another significant difference is that I was a budding artist in my 20s when I did my first show, and now I’ll be 70, a senior citizen,” he laughs.

He asserts that as an actor he was only a small part of the director’s design. “The films you love me for were Basu Chatterjee or Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films. You will see more of the artist in the films I directed,” says Amol, pointing out how he filled his frames with greys and browns, supplemented with costumes and skin instead of ugly images to show the drought in Bangarwadi. “And in Paheli I used a huge step well to introduce the ghosts, the location with its innovative visual design is used by even Holywood filmmakers.”

This exhibition is not a flashback to the past but a collections of his artworks painted in 2014. “I was a little apprehensive going back to painting but today when I wake up in the morning, all I want to do is go stand in front of the canvas, control and conquer that space. Today I don’t want to impress people with my strokes.
I know, like any swimmer, that it’s far more difficult to float on water without creating any ripples. Unlike acting which is all about reaching out to an audience outwardly, art is more introspective. My paintings are my dialogue with myself where even the pauses and silences speak,” he says, adding, “I hope my audience will like this journey as much as they liked my acting journey.”