When Sheila Arora, ’11, talks about painting, her voice quickens.
“I love the process of painting,” she said. “You just sort of lean into your feelings, lean into your body, lean into your intuition. It’s spontaneous. You don’t plan ahead. You paint what you’re feeling at the moment.”
At her sunny apartment in Evanston, Illinois—which doubles as her studio—canvases are everywhere, stacked against walls and piled on top of every surface.
Arora’s work is abstract and brilliantly colored using vivid combinations of materials, including oils and acrylics, charcoals and pastels that are built up in loose grids that both conceal and reveal earlier ideas and conceptions.
Occasionally, there are scrawled lines or wobbly geometric shapes or half-painted-out words and phrases. But mainly there are ecstatic clouds of color—reds and pinks, mauve, emerald green, teal and midnight blue, purple and sunflower yellow—highlighted by splotches of inky black.
“Every painting I do is different, and you have to figure it out while you’re doing it,” she said. “I never thought of myself as a risk-taker in the corporate world, but when I’m painting I’ll try anything.”
The mention of the corporate world momentarily silences her. Arora is midway through a yearlong sabbatical from her job as a finance manager for Walgreens and is not sure what direction she will eventually choose to pursue.
As a child, Arora was always drawing and painting. But she came from a family of engineers, and eventually succumbed to the pressure to enter the business world. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton with a degree in economics and finance and pursued an MBA at Booth. And for 15 years, she climbed the corporate ladder.
She started as an associate consultant at Rosetta before joining Kraft Foods (now Kraft Heinz) as a financial analyst. This was followed by seven years at Walgreens, where she began as a senior financial analyst and eventually moved up to finance manager with responsibility for $150 million in corporate spending.