Art Education
I often remember the books available when I was a student, most of them were by Raduga (Moscow) or Beijing (Peiking) Publishers and they contained beautiful illustrations! Those were simply unforgettable. Illustrations, which were used there for ‘mass education’ along with their literary elements, played an important role in the foundation of my composition technique and the sense of colour application.
Since childhood I had a habit of collecting and copying prints of the renowned paintings. This made me familiar to the works of of Abanindranath Tagore, Amrita Shergill, Devi Prasad RoyChowdhury, Nandalal Bose, Binodbihari Mukhopadhyay, Sunayani Devi, Gopal Ghosh, Ramkinkar Baij and many other Indian masters. They were all in my private collection. Among them, the lives and works of Ramkinkar, Gopal Ghosh and Binodbihari Mukhopadhyay were my guiding lights. Keeping aside the global artistic revolution, each of these giants were pillars of the modern Indian artistic overhaul.
Particularly two books – Nandalal Bose’s ‘Drishti O Srishti’ and Binodbihari Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Chitrakar’, taught me how to observe and realise the “Art”. I have never come across of any other book so profound as these; especially on nature, mankind and life. From pages of these books began my first artistic journey.
Later, during my days in the Government College of Art & Craft (Kolkata), while going through the prescribed British colonial course, certain questions began to haunt me. What are the areas of development of individual art in Indian perspective besides that of different tribes and communities?
The modernism initiated in Shantiniketan under the patronage of Rabindranath Tagore was a unique blend of personal ethics and Indian and Occidental schools of art, life and it’s geographical effects. From the dogmatic view of following the archaeological history, everyday life of common people, their geographical realities and ever flowing cultural stream provided me the most sincere lessons and I started to absorb those elements which played an important role to shape my preliminary artistic vision. The journey of my individual art practice began from this hour.
