Artist Madhuri Bhaduri believes that every colour in abstract art has significance and resonance. So while red is symbolic of life blood, green stands for rejuvenation, and yellow for the radiance of the sun
Punebased artist Madhuri Bhaduri has been an acclaimed artist for the past four decades. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in India and abroad, and forms the part of art collections of discerning patrons.
Bhaduri’s inherent athleticism and artistic pursuits may be traced to her genes. Her father Shivram Phalnikar played national level badminton and her mother Durga Phalnikar was an acclaimed Indian classical vocalist. Yet, to her credit even as she inherited talents she went on to hone her skills and has created a distinct body of work at different periods of her life. In her earliest works, like those of the Impressionist masters she so admires, Bhaduri sought to capture the mood of a moment and the transient effects of light and colour of natural vistas she so loved using unmixed primary colours and hundreds of minute strokes. The paintings were always about bringing home a vignette of natural beauty rather than attempting to prophesise or convey a social message.
Yet, within the body of works she created, there would invariably be one or a few rendered in an abstract style, where the form and details would be pared down to suggest rather that recreate the actual subject; a facet that would years later come to blossom and encompass all her work.
Extending her formal study of human figures during her masters in art and painting from SNDT, Pune (completed in 1988), Bhaduri painted nudes and figurative through the 1990s. She also worked on a series of clown paintings — poignant works of painted faces concealing pain — that conveyed the exigency of at times presenting a cheerful demeanour to the world in the most testing of times.
Discovering abstraction is much deeper than a play of colour or lines, in the past decade Bhaduri returned to her first love of landscapes and created a body of abstract landscapes and seascapes. “Abstracts are about the person you are. They help you understand and work out the complexity of your own emotions. As I explored the expression I came to love the process of painting abstracts,” she says.
There was no looking back as she started painting abstract seascapes. Travels to port towns across the world brought Bhaduri in touch with the beauty of the sea, its openness and vastness, the majesty of spectacular sunsets across sky and water, and views of fishing boats at sea or tied at the shore. As the artist recalled those seascapes, she created spectacular vignettes of sky, water and boats, in rich colours and tones, creating a spectrum of moods.
Reflecting on the works Bhaduri says as form dissolves in abstracts, colour takes on a fundamental importance. And she wields colour magically, she brings earth, water and sky alive in all their glory, breathes life into sunsets and captures the essence of suggested forms.
Through colour and brush strokes, she touches a chord in the viewer, stirring memories and emotions, bringing the beauty and intensity of the sea, land and sky, of old monuments, forgotten or living, into the inner space of the viewer.
Each colour in the abstracts has a beauty, significance and resonance — red is symbolic of life blood, green of rejuvenation, blue of peace and divinity, yellow the radiance of the sun, orange of deep insight and black embodying an infinite, unfathomable void that sometimes overtakes our lives.
“Art is an expression of what you are and my abstracts are what I am. Much of my work is inspired by travel. From museums like the Paul Klee Museum in Bern and the many beautiful places I have visited in Banaras, the Konkan Coast, ladakh, Croatia, Petra, Guilin in China and Istanbul, among others. I bring back memories, the romance, visual impressions and images of colour of a place, and recreate them on canvas,” she explains.
Her recent body of work recalls images of places visited in abstract forms, a rich colour palette and in haunting open vistas. “I have created a story on each canvas, starting by visualising a place, recalling a memory, and allowed the flow to take me forward and be part of the sequential forms and layering that go on to emerge. I find myself using multiple colours on some canvases, with one colour being predominant. I also find beauty in colour palettes like black and gold that recall the mystery and splendour of the sea by night,” Bhaduri adds.
In these stunning works all the unessential forms and details have been pared away, and just the essence of a place has been brought to life most effortlessly. “As the frills of life decrease so do the frills of art diminish. I can feel that I have reached where I needed to reach. It is just me, canvas, paint and the essence of my emotion. Painting is now like meditation. I feel closest to God when I paint,” she says.