Manu parekh’s studio sits on the first floor of his home in Delhi’s Sukhdev Vihar—a ‘middle-income group’ flat that is almost a spoof on the orderly domesticity below. The kitchen stocks paper rolls, the two bedrooms are filled with finished canvases. The living room, which is the heart of his workspace, is littered with hair spray cans used to fix charcoal on canvas, used tea-bags near an electric kettle and a sprawl of whiskey bottles on one of the shelves. And towering above the clutter, nailed to the wall, is a huge six-by-five-feet canvas, part of his forthcoming series on Benaras.

Parekh has been using this studio for the past 15 years but almost two years ago, he rented a larger space. “It was much more organised. But after a couple of months, I realised that all I needed was a huge wall to hook my canvases on. I could not relate to the tidiness and the expanse and so I returned to my chaos,” he says.

As he works on his canvas, drops of paint fall into patterns on the floor—something that fascinates Parekh but irritates his painter-wife, Madhvi. “Whenever I call her to the studio to see a new piece of work, what catches her attention more than the canvas is the untidy work area and the paint smears,” he says.

Look around the living room and you see that the artist is not one for rigid arrangements. Tubes of paint and brushes lie scattered on tables and racks. Two shelves in opposite corners are stacked with books on art. On one of the tables is a Workspace audio system, filmed with dust. “Music is a luxury. I rarely combine it with work,” Parekh says.

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