Maya Burman, is the daughter of the well-known painter Sakti Burman. The striking thing about her paintings is the amount of detail in them. In formal terms Maya Burman's paintings have a tapestry like effect where everything is subordinate to patterning, reminiscent of the French art nouveau tradition. The figures have an archetypal aura about them and their rendering in a clean decisive manner has its sources in Picasso's later classical period, his return after the war into an idyllic land inhabited by healthy and young boys of Athenian ideal.
Maya Burman's technique is a slow step-by-step process of accumulation of marks. She makes a pencil sketch first, then applies the layer of water colours and finishes the outlines and detail in black ink with a pen. There is certain precision to the rendering, a legacy perhaps of her training as an architect, which contrasts nicely with the ambiguities of the themes that she handles. The paintings are a meeting ground of two cultures - Indian as well as French. The details of Indian miniature painting and European Middle Age architecture merge in her art, and literature and poetry are also very much present as they provide her with new images, as the poetry of Spanish Frederico Garcia Lorex or the Japanese `Iku'. Her compositions are mostly figurative and change according to her mood. Ms. Burman lives in Paris but in her paintings she retires to a land of lyricism and allegory.