Chinvat Bridge (2003)
Acrylic on canvas – 12 x 30 inches

Abstract (1971)
Oil on canvas – 18 x 31 inches

Aerial View No 17 (1998)
Oil on canvas – 26.25 x 54 inches

Aerial View (1963)
Oil on canvas – 48 x 30 inches

Siesta (1964)
Oil on canvas – 27 x 14 inches

Dance and Divinity (2017)
Oil on canvas – 28 x 34 inches

Morning Darshan (2017)
Oil on canvas – 30 x 36 inches

Shankar Palsikar built his legacy on painting the abstract devoid of an occidental consciousness but somewhere pure abstraction always remained distant as it was always mirrored with a lens of spirituality. Jijina though represents the thick impasto strokes of progressive modernism whilst possessing the intrigue of experimentation with colour. Even though he was a Parsi priest, politics within the temple made him wary of mixing his vocation with his beliefs. Thus, after his inaugural solo at the Jehangir Art Gallery where he painted the life of Zarathustra, he concentrated his practice more on painting his abstracts. Nissim Ezekiel writes in the Times of India on 23/8/1975 on Naval Jijina – ” He saves his work from being conventional through uninhibited impasto. (Yes, even abstract art in this country has become conventional owing to an excess of the genre.)”

Perhaps music provided a certain relief from contending just with spirituality, it was a parallel form of art and in the age of conceptualism where these boundaries between genres are all erased Jijina was surely an early thinker. Jijina joined the Photographic Society of India under the influence of Rustomji Belihomji and merited in form of colour transparencies with photography. Which is not surprising as we see a generous use of zinc white gesso and coverings in Jijina’s impasto, along with faint expressions of figurative objects, a bird’s eye view of imagined landscapes, there is a story and the audience follows. This is why we term the retrospective Music Modern.

Music Modern is the first viewing of a solo show by the artist Naval Jijina where he proposes a lifetime of works that intertwine painting colour with classical Indian music. An orphan who was trained to be a Parsi Priest, Jijina joined the Sir JJ School of Arts in 1956, Bombay where he became a colour alchemist under Shankar Palshikar. He studied mural painting under Baburao Sadwelkar. Aerial Views became his subject using imaginary aerial visions and musical nodes. When he was an art student at the Nutan Kala Mandir near the French Bridge before joining the Sir JJ School of Arts, Jijina came under the sway of Maharashtrian Classical Music scene. Jijina was influenced by Hindustani Classical Music and had passed his first-year exam in tabla playing under the apprenticeship of Pandit Keki Jijina. He established the ‘Everyman’s Gallery’ in 1968 under the patronship of Dr. Pestonji Behramji Warden on Princess Street to allow artists like him to find a free space for exhibitions.

When he graduated in 1962, he held an extensive exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery – ‘Life of Zarathushtra’. The show was sponsored by Dr Warden who had the show travel to Udwada, Navsari, Surat and Ahmedabad. The paintings were then acquired by the ‘Zoroastrian Society of London’. A painting from the series appeared at a recent auction at the Roseberry Fine Art Auctioneers in the United States from this series. In 2019 a painting on a Zoroastrian mythological tale the ‘Behram Yazad was commissioned and purchased by Dr. Pesi B Chacha and donated to the Parsi Community Hall in Singapore. The exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery of Zoroastrian subjects was Jijina’s last figurative exhibition, quitting priesthood he began his experiments with painting abstraction that he called ‘Aerial Views’, abstracts that emerged in the 1960s from the JJ School based upon Shankar Palshikar’s discourse on Indian spirituality and Paul Klee.

Jijina also became an avid photographer and married Gool Jijina (1934) who studied at the St. Xavier’s College, Bombay and worked at the Central Bank of India for 30 years. She studied art as a hobby and did her elementary and intermediate art examinations from the Bai Bengallee School. We see a marked collaboration between Naval and Gool apart from companionship, Gool painted similar portraits holding the same anatomical vigour that came from the Sir JJ School of Arts. Naval’s ‘Einstein’ and ‘Foreigner’ portraits cannot be distinguished in style from Gool’s portraits of family members. Gool’s portrait by Naval, Gool’s portrait of Naval and Gool’s auto-portrait are interesting examples of their technical collaboration. In their suburban apartment a life of painting together fought the trysts of destiny. Thus, the retrospective when we attempt to portray the life of the artist, it is an injustice if we attempt to hide their collaborators and fellow travellers in artistic practice.

Image of the World (1966)
Oil on canvas – 36 x 18 inches

Portrait of Gool Jijina (1970)
Oil on canvas – 24 x 24 inches

Portrait of a foreigner (1964)
Oil on board – 16 x 20 inches

In 1968 his ‘Aerial View’s’ won awards from the Bombay Art Society and the Artist Centre. Jijina began doing freelance textile design for cloth merchants in Mulji Jetha Market who would pay minimal amounts for the job-work. He worked as a textile designer in Srinivas Cotton Mills at Lower Parel from where he was retrenched in 1976. Thereafter he joined Lajya Silk Mills but eventually recession in the Textile Industry resulted in the closure of many textile units and Lajya Silk Mills suffered a blow. Through his vocation in textile design Jijina shifted to Delhi finding a job with a textile mill there, where he reconnected with his fellow abstractionist V S Gaitaonde. Gaitonde and Jijina were interesting colleagues as both had a penchant for being reclusive and engrossed in music attempting the visuals of music with modernism. Vocabularies drawn out of the solace Indian classical music allowed alleviating the pains that came with Mill Strikes, when he lost his job and found himself only painting. Born in 1929 in Surat, Jijina is a practicing artist living in Andheri, Bombay, keen to continue and retrace his paths to mythology.

Bird’s Eye (1966)
Oil on board – 30 x 36 inches

Still life (1962)
Oil on canvas – 36 x 28 inches