If one has the eye for it, one would know that the Khajuraho Dance Festival this year had much more on offer than just breathtaking classical dance forms, says MUSBA HASHMI
It is only after you travel places that you realise what all talents are being nurtured in our country. A case in point is a small pretty shop in the Khajuraho Dance Festival, that wasn’t attractive enough to catch your attention in the first go. But if you would have been lucky to stop by it, is only then that you would have realised what beauty it beholded.
A girl in her late 20s was busy sorting stuff on her shop — ear rings, name plates and some wall hangings. In between this clutter, at the corner of the shop, one would be able to see a few paintings hanging. There was something about them that will make one stop to have a close look. That is when, a voice said these are made from instant coffee. Yes, you read that right.
Meet Akrita Dubey, a management student, a self-taught artist and a handcrafter by profession based out of Bhopal, who during the lockdown decided to explore a different way of painting.
It was not curiosity, but need that lead to this, what one may call, discovery.
“I love painting while exploring new mediums of art. It was during the lockdown that I received a lot of requests from my students and followers asking how to paint and be creative without having any art supplies. This got me thinking. I came up with the idea of coffee painting that would come to their rescue. Although coffee painting is an ancient popular art form in China and the Middle East, but it is rarely known in our country,” Dubey tells you.
However, as fascinating it may sound, it is definitely all the more challenging too. The biggest challenge, of course, is to make a colour pallet with one single shade. This, she says, can be done by managing its consistency. “One just have to decide the coffee and water ratio to come up with different shades. I use three shades for my work,” she explains.
The second challenge is using right amount of water and managing its flow. If its too watery, it will float on paper and ruin your hard work. The third challenge is to select the right thickness of paper. And last but the most important one is how to preserve the finished artwork.
“It goes without saying that ants would be attracted towards coffee and as a result can destroy your painting. Hence, the first thing is to make sure you have left your painting to dry at a safe place which is not easily accessible by insects. To further preserve coffee art either laminate them or spray it with a fixative after they have completely dried. This will increase their shelf life,” Dubey, who has till date made about 30 coffee paintings, explains.
While every painting took between one and four days to get completed, there were times when Dubey’s hard work had gone in vain because of a slight error.
“I have learnt through my own mistakes. There is an incident when I was painting Rapunzel. It was raining that day. It was only half way into the process that I realised my mistake of choosing a paper with wrong thickness. My strokes started bleeding and due to the humid weather it was challenging for me to correct it. The reason being the coffee will take more time to dry out and hence, will continue to bleed for sometime. At that very moment, I realised that I had ruined this piece. I decided to leave it then and there and wait for the weather to clear. The next day I started all over again, but this time with success. So, sometimes it does become a challenge to work with coffee. Hence, one has to be very careful,” she tells you.
Her inspiration behind these paintings, she says, is her heart.
“I paint whatever I feel like connected to. The sunset, the moon, the galaxie, anything and everything that I am able to relate to. I am a bit filmy as well sooo anything related to eternal love appeals to me as well. and out of all the paintings that I made, the one which comes close to my heart is of Rapunzel. It is because I imagine myself as the character. We share some similarities too, like I too have long hair like her and I want to do all those adventures that she did and make my dreams come true,” she says.
Like other painting techniques, Dubey wants that coffee painting should also get enough exposure so that more and more people take to it.
“One of the main reason to motivate people to do coffee painting is that the fragrance of coffee in itself is a mood lifter. The process while doing coffee painting helps us relieving stress and anxiety. For that particular moment when one is busy painting, one feels like he is living in a happy place,” Dubey, who also has an instagram page where one can place orders to buy these paintings, tells you.