An artist need not be trained to imbibe things around him. Rather the university of life may teach him a lot through his plain and simple observations with a keen eye. For that is the biggest institution of education on earth,” espouses talented painter Swapan Majumder, who prefers to keep the mind to matter.
Adhering to the axiom, he fathoms that the way nature has a landscape, the human thought-zone too opens to a terrain, which may or may not be convincing to the naked, physical eye. “Like different places portray different pictures, similarly different minds delineate distinguishably diverse vistas, expanding from one corner to the other,” he explains his point. “But is it feasible to draw the mind-frame which continuously bursts at the seams with doubts, questions and dilemmas, seeking answers from the very earthly existence of ours? Well for some connoisseurs, it is a strange, queer space to delve into, while for others, it is a revisited track to hover over. In a nutshell, it’s a cross between the known and the unknown images; the mundane and the metaphysical margins,” he sheds light, to touch upon a far-reaching aspect.
From a cluster of abstract and figurative paintings that the artist had recently exhibited at Kolkata’s reputed gallery of Academy of Fine Arts, he himself scrupulously picks up a piece aesthetically depicting a nude female form lying prostrate in the lap of nature’s bountiful beauty under a bright, open, sunlit sky. Decoding the graceful illustration, he enlightens that “in the midst of nature, both men and women are but offshoots of the soil. The body is borne out of the earth and unobstructedly blends into its dust after death. So there’s no sense of moral urgency to hide one’s modesty from the very creation which one belongs to. The figure can remain uninhibitedly exposed or unclothed in blissful solitude encircled by nature’s elements where it supposedly feels one with God, its Almighty creator. Well, it is the modern civil society that dictates a decorous code of conduct to dress up in public and cover up the bare skin. At the end of the day, we are all but God’s particles. Aren’t we? It is His hands that have made us in the ethereal heaven and put us into this world of pragmatic affairs.”
Pointing to another specimen from the collage, which elegantly describes a classical musician waiting patiently with her sitar for the other accompanying players to come and join the soiree, and support her on the tabla or with other instruments. She sits eagerly on the stage, which is elegantly set and decked up to begin the concert. The figure is designed in such a shape that it resembles the curvy roundness of her stringed device. “A true born artist is known by his/her work or performance delivered with dignity. Here the instrument is synonymous with the artist’s name and identity. Hence, it gets reflected through her physical appearance, as if surreptitiously entering deep into her soul. Of course, she too is totally involved in her music in return and apparently mirrors the sitar’s identical image on her body,” he endorses his style of presentation.
Inclined to bathe his oeuvre in a vivid shade-scheme, Majumder majorly resorts to acrylic as well as oil hues on both canvas and paper with a bar of earthy hues for his chosen palette. Having showcased a matrix of 21 paintings for this particular gallery splurge, the sizes ranged from 7”X9”, 12”X16” to 30”X36”.
Having tested the pulse of the audience from the just-concluded solo show, this humble, affable painter wishes to increase his stockpile with a separate series on human faces as well as on varied landscapes. “Face we know is the index of the mind that bears its impression. But a face also wears masks and is deceptive at times. It changes its expression depending upon the mood or a specific mental make-up, which one applies at a given time. Accordingly, a barrage of emotions comes pouring in through the face, which is either ecstatic or melancholic in nature. A spectrum of joy, sorrow, agony, pensiveness, despondency is thus given a vent via the outlet called visage. It is like the monitor of a computer, clearly displaying the fed in data upon its screen through the input device of the mind-keyboard,” he elaborates.
With plans up his sleeve to carry forth his augmented collection to other states outside West Bengal, the soft-spoken, middle-aged artist announces his next destination to be either Delhi or Bengaluru for a brand new colour splash. In the landscape snatches, the painter is determined to share the pain of nature with his aficionados. “There is deforestation all over with the tireless growth of urbanisation. And that is leaving quite a frown of bother over the concerning menace of global-warming and climate change. A tree is lumbered and traded off for sale or export to gain commercially. It is always truncated and prevented to grow and elongate. Hence, its rock-solid foundation gets massively shaken off at the root. But doesn’t this dastardly act reverberate our own society, which always throws an organised order in to a disarray and jeopardises its stability forever?” he raises a potent issue to ponder over.