Anjolie Ela Menon, a well known senior contemporary artist, was born in 1940 at Burnpur, West Bengal. Menon was into painting right from her childhood and incidentally sold her works at the age of fifteen. She formally studied art from the J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. Unable to adjust to the academic surroundings in the college, she left her formal art education incomplete. In 1959, she left India to pursue her art studies in Europe on a scholarship granted from the French government. She has also conducted several study tours in France, U.K., and the USA. At the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Art in Paris, she began to innovate with a muted palette of translucent colours, which she produced by repeatedly applying oil paint in a thin glaze, layers over layers. She used various mediums such as painting on hardboard, canvases and paper. Her technique of enhancing the finely textured surface in her artworks by buffing the finished work with a soft dry brush gave her works an iconic identity and characteristic. Her subjects did encroach the characteristics of early Christian art – including the frontal perspective, the slight elongated body and the averted head – but chose to stick to the female nude as a frequent subject creating a symphony of the erotic and the melancholic. Currently her works are subtle yet strong in the usage of lines and colours. Anjole Ela Menon was awarded Padma Shri by the Indian Government in 2000.