Have we lost touch with our inner selvesIJ This is the question we often ask ourselves. And, the artists at The Art Show , a group exhibition, seek to answer this through their sketches on nature, human behaviour and animals. Arpita Singh reports
A budding artist from Delhi College of Arts, Aahuti Narayan, draws the endangered sparrows on the canvas, to depict her love with nature. “Nature is the best gift of god to us. It’s a treasure and we need to protect and preserve”, she says. Expressing her concern on this endangered species, she said, “It’s really a serious issue and together we need to do something about it”. “I have created reflections of sparrows in one of my paintings and through the sparrow sitting alone in another painting I tried to show how a bird feels, when it is left alone or when it is captured by a human being”, she added.
Drawing the exemplary landscape of Port Blair in one of her paintings, she also portrayed, a running leopard, and its expressions. The works of the other artists like Jagdish Dey, Manoj Nayak, Kuldeep Singh, Dharmendra Rathore, Mohan Singh and Shridhar Iyer, also depicted intimacy with nature, human beings and animals.
Going through the paintings, Professor Niren Sen Gupta, an eminent artist and former Principal of College of Art, New Delhi, said that “The artists tried to showcase a different kind of art. They have variety in their creations, which is amazing.”
According to Sen, art has various forms and it keep changing with time. When asked about the difference he notices between the new and old artists of his era, he said, “When I compare the young artists with myself, I see nowadays the budding artists are getting much deeper into art than I used to be. The young artists are very conceptual and much more vigilant about the social change than we used to be.”
“To become a perfect artist, one need to be very sincere about his work, there is no short cut to become an artist. Art should be enjoyed and an artist should know how to capture one’s heart and mind through his art. It should be unique and leave an impression on one’s mind,” added Sen.
He was amused by the young artists’ exhibition. Speaking about the art as a freedom of expressing inner thoughts, he said, “It is a freedom of expression, so we can’t criticise anybody’s art. Every artist tried to express their own different story through their paintings. Some portrayed the beauty of nature and other tried to put human figure and their expression through their creations.”
Works by a number of emerging artists from different states like Bhopal, Hyderabad, Haryana andDelhi were showcased at the exhibition which concluded on Monday.