Artist Sanjay Bhattacharya masters a subject to create his different series of paintings. Despite that, he tells Saimi Sattar, he is merely the slave of his canvas
Merely by looking at the footpath, I can say whether it is Bhowanipur or Bowbazar in Kolkata. It is with this kind of intensity that I studied the the city for five years for a series on it,” says artist Sanjay Bhattacharya. That one sentence encapsulates a lot of what the painter is about. Intense, obsessed with his subject and intent on capturing all possible variations and nuances. Bhattacharya studied the city with absolute focus. “I have seen Kolkata like no one has. I have gone under the Howrah bridge, stood above New Market to get a different perspective of the place. Not many residents can claim that they have seen the city the way I have,” he says with a guffaw.
But having mastered one subject, Bhattacharya is also quick to move on to a new one and takes it up with equal intensity and focus when it strikes his fancy. “I can’t stick to a particular subject and that’s why I change. This happens spontaneously, it isn’t planned. If I like something, I jump,” he says.
The gamut of his work and different series can be seen in a recently published book, Mirror to the World, which features his collection of watercolours, oil on canvas, sketches and photographs over a span of four decades from 1977-2017.
The taking up of something that appeals to him extends to his profession as well. Painting happened to him by chance as Bhattacharya had no plans of becoming an artist. One of the three sons of an accountant, he was a bad student, not interested in books, who cleared his exams in the third division as he was often given to doodling sketches of comic characters like Mandrake, Phantom and occasionally Rabindranath Tagore during class.
“I had joined the City College in Kolkata in the Arts stream when I heard that there is a college where there are no books,” he remembers. Though arts was not considered a paying profession, his parents were relieved that this good-for-nothing boy could “at least paint sign boards for a living.” He appeared for an entrance test and joined the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta.
But initially, life even in arts college wasn’t smooth here. He scored the lowest grade possible in the first year but from second year onwards, he was hooked to painting. “It’s in my character if I get interested in something, I really go for it. In college, we had one Vacation Award, and I got it every single year,” he says. Bhattacharya’s devotion can be gauged from the fact that while the person who won the second prize, might have deposited 60-70 works for the award, Bhattacharya was way ahead with nothing less than 200-250 works.
The artist believes in going that extra mile outside his work space too. When asked to pose for a photograph, he wants to make it outstanding rather than have a “conventional frame.” So a brass cobra materialises from nowhere which he promptly fixes on top of his head. He follows it up by peeking out from in-between a palette and a handful of brushes. At college, his focus helped and things started looking up. The growth was assisted by legendary painter Bikash Bhattacharjee, who was his teacher in the fourth and fifth year of his college. While he was attracted to realistic paintings, it was under Bhattacharjee’s influence that he took it up in his work. “Bikash was a star in the college. He would teach us in the morning and in the evening we would attend his exhibition and be inspired to work like him,” says the painter, who has done a series on Rajiv Gandhi, Santiniketan, on Salvador Dali and Rembrandt amongst others. Bhattacharya’s last exhibition was at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai and featured 12 huge oil paintings on Santiniketan.
However, it was a long and often arduous road. After completing his course, Bhattacharya worked first at the ad agency, Clarion for nine months in Kolkata where he was paid Rs 800 per month. But the atmosphere and the work were not to his liking and he resigned and came to Delhi and joined another ad agency HTA, where he worked for seven months before quitting.
For five years, from 1982-87, it was a tough phase for the painter. Money was hard to come by and times were tough for Bhattacharya who was married to Bulbul by that time. For the lack of a drawing table, Bhattacharya used to spread out his canvas on the floor and draw there. “Once I got some money from some commercial work and it was a toss-up between buying the table and a sweater for my wife,” he remembers. However, those days continue to inspire him. “It inspires me to work hard,” says Bhattacharya who works with oil, water colour and sketches.
Bhattacharya worked hard to create a series which was a tribute to Satyajit Ray’s movies in 1999. “Ray not only made films but also created two dimensional posters. As a tribute, I adapted his technique but did not use the faces of actors in my work. The faces were of common, normal people.” He recalls that Pritish Nandy was really taken up with the deposit of oils in this series which was in monochrome.
But there were others before Nandy who appreciated his work. In 1988, Bhattacharya held an exhibition at the now defunct Aurobindo Art gallery where writer, hotelier, and architectural restorer Aman Nath came along with lekha Poddar, who now has the most comprehensive collection of contemporary Indian art. Nath advised Poddar to buy Bhattacharya’s work and also commissioned a single water colour of a haveli in Haryana. When Bhattacharya saw the place, he felt it was made for him and did 10-12 water colours, thinking that Nath would select the one that he liked and Bhattacharya would retain the rest. However, Nath asked him to do 20 more and organised a show which also featured the water colour works of Sir David Goodhall, the British High Commissioner and Catherine Kleemo, the French Ambassador’s wife. At the exhibition titled, Indian, French and British Water Colours at Karma Galleries in Mehrauli in 1989, 17-18 of Bhattacharya’s works which cost between Rs 3,000 and Rs 4,000 were sold out within 15 minutes.
Alka Pande, art historian and curator says, “Bhattacharya is a traditionalist who has mastery over water colours.” He believes in the primacy of the subject as far as his work is concerned. “The painter is a nobody. It is the subject that decides how big a painting would be, whether it be square, rectangle, horizontal or vertical. We are slaves as we get the demand and obey. The work is the master,” he asserts emphatically.
Bhattacharya is dressed casually in a red and grey T-shirt and jeans. He looks relaxed amongst the huge canvasses stacked up in his studio in west Delhi. A play of light and shadow is something that emerges consistently in his work. “light and shadow represent life. If you put out the light, it is dark and the shadow is not there. These are my own realisations. This is my belief. Others might believe something else,” he philosophises.
The winner of AIFACS Award and the Sahitya Kala Parishad Annual Exhibition Award, Bhattacharya has two shows lined up on the Popular Shrines of India but he hasn’t narrowed down on the venue or the dates. “Sometime in 2017 or 2018,” he says signing off as he once again delves deeply into his work.
Photo: Pankaj Kumar