Memories of our close relationship with nature, and the growing up days in a village, when leisure meant being together, without the television or the Internet, are the new subjects of a series of paintings currently displaying at the Art Entrance Gallery, M.G. Road, Mumbai. Envisioned by the Bengali couple Vaskar Sheel and Chitra Mandal, the collection of 29 paintings and charcoal sketches are a treat for the eyes.
Vaskar’s portrayal of the slowly disintegrating relationship between us human beings and nature comes out as a hard-hitting graphic tale of love and longing. Using birds, snakes, leaves, fishes and flowers as motifs, he creates a labyrinth of images where humans grow leaves and roots and live closely connected to nature, where nudity is not meant to evoke sensuality but proximity to nature and where humans communicate their love for each other through receptors that resemble the carple which comprises the female reproductive organs of a flower.
Says Vaskar, “We have moved away from nature to a large extent. But we keep forgetting that the trees, air, sunlight, shadows cover us and protect us. We are connected to nature just like plants and flowers are.”
And here by “nature” he not just means mother Earth, but the original traits of our personality as well, which we humans hide behind the thick layering of clothes made mandatory by the society. “If the society didn’t exist we wouldn’t feel the need to wear clothes. Look at animals and how they’ve been living with nature for thousands of years. We wear clothes because we don’t want to show our inner self to the people around us. I’m not saying we shouldn’t wear clothes, but if we are using it to hide the real us, it’s time we dropped them. These clothes are separating us from the innocence of the nature outside and inside us,” he says, adding, “It’s not a man or woman that’s nude, it’s the thinking that is so.”
Vaskar, who lives with his wife Chitra in a small village in West Bengal, says the inspiration for his paintings came from observing people and what nature means to them. But a painting, for him, is never a product of constant thinking. It’s something that just happens. “It’s like a sensation, which I feel in my mind. The shapes take a form on their own. And they tell me which colour has to go where. It’s like they speak to me,” says Vaskar.
The artist’s style of working is similar to the pottery art which is characterised by the dominance of the colour red, followed by a constant repetition of yellow and brown. And this gave his artwork a touch of the Bengali folk art. “It’s been constantly changing and evolving into a modern form,” he says, adding, “But I don’t know why the colour red attracts me a lot. It dominates me whenever I look at it,” says the artist.
And while Vaskar’s artworks give Memory Lane the seriousness the issue demands, Chitra’s paintings offer a colourful imagery of what the village life was like long before television invaded its peaceful landscape. “Earlier, village women used to spend a lot of time together singing and dancing, or even combing each others hair or giving an oil massage. But those days are over. The television has led to the death of this togetherness which we once shared.”
Although Chitra has learnt the art from Vaskar, her paintings display a unique style and approach to the subject, made more visible in her experimentative use of dots which adds a lot of contrast to the colourful portrayal of village women.
The show continues
till December 24