It is his love for art that prompts Ansuman Pati to experiment with colours. His collection of paintings, ‘Bijayaa’, exhibited at the Lalit Kala Akademi last week, depicted figures, which stood out from the multiple coats of paint. “The paint is scratched away over certain portions to emphasise the texture. I do not decide on what to paint; the forms take shape as the work progresses,” said Ansuman.His colour palette includes earth-fired yellow, rusty orange, sombre blue and deep red. It isn’t just the solid colours that makes them unique, it’s also the movement Ansuman captures with his brushstrokes that make his paintings positively pulse with energy. Abstract forms of human beings and nature are a recurrent motif in his works. Be it oil, Indian ink or acrylic on canvas, human relationships and emotions are central to his works.Just where do these renderings of life fit in? “I attempt to transfer my observations of life and people onto my canvas. I depict the changing world through my work,” says the painter.The artist feels his paintings are not ‘modern’ but contemporary in keeping with the changing style in art the world over. “I hate repetition. “I take care not to repeat myself in my paintings. But I do dwell upon the relationships between man and woman, man and nature, the pain and grief that are an undeniable part of life.”One of his paintings in the exhibition depicted the ‘Never Ending’ trauma of devastation that the Mother Earth has to go through. With green, blue and brown colours, he drew cyclone, a tsunami and global warming in three corners of one canvas. The fourth corner had the ‘Fallen Homo Sapiens’ and from a distance, the painting appeared like the helpless face of a woman. “The face is that of the Mother Earth as she expresses the never ending pain that she endures as humans go about destructing nature in the name of development,” he said.Another painting had Buddha, representing the element of peace, surrounded by thick trunks of a tree signifying human needs and emotions.Besides colours, Ansuman worked on the basic coloured paper to create interesting works on the themes of devotion, religion and dreams. His ‘Cut & Paste’ work ‘Immortal’ had the figure of a Sphinx fixed on a canvas of gunny bag. A business administration student and a web designer by profession, Ansuman has not undergone any training in art. After working in Bangalore and Hyderabad for few years, Ansuman returned to Odisha to set up his own venture. He came across some artists in Bhubaneswar and the world of colours beckoned. Constant interaction with them inspired him to take up art as a vocation in 2010.Apart from paintings, Ansuman tries his hands at sculpting and preparing vases, wall hangings, masks and small decorative pieces with scrap iron, papier-mâché, fibre and wood medium, some of which were also exhibited in the show. Ansuman has now decided to market his paintings and other creations under the brand name of Pati’s Designs. This was the painter’s second solo exhibition, the first one being in Jagatsinghpur last year.
Comments
0 comment