Colours from a young canvas

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They are young, energetic and eager to explore the world outside. Their art is as vibrant as their youth and their canvas as eclectic as their individual expression.

But in their work, there is no angst that is typical of a new generation; instead there is a sense of serenity and maturity, which a few would associate with art students who have freshly graduated from college.
In a show called “Textures”, Art Perspective presents a debut art venture of four post-graduate students from Delhi College of Art, which includes both paintings and installations.
The participating artists include Meeyong Jaiwook, Swati Dayal, Bharti Verma and Devyani Jain. From exploring the idea of “a place” to understanding spirituality, these young artists have taken to the brush with an open mind and are not fearful of experimenting with abstractions and illusions.
Bharti, 25, who completed her MFA (Painting) in 2012, adds an element of intrigue as she plays on the concept of depth and illusion in her pen-on-canvas paintings. While the pen drawings are painstakingly sketched to create spaces like a home or a building, in each canvas she has used objects like a lock, a mirror, threads and photographs to add an element of mystery.
“I wanted to convey that there is no division between a painting and an installation and hence, I have used these objects to eliminate the division between the two genres,” says Bharti.
Surprisingly, having lived in Delhi for 25 years, she never felt that she belonged to any place or had even a small space to call her own. “As a loner, this feeling always disturbed me and my work started reflecting the need to portray spaces that belonged to no one and yet were part of everyone’s life,” she adds.
Apart from the four paintings titled Secret Vault (pen on canvas with threads, Memories (pen on canvas with photographs), Transgression (pen on canvas with lock) and Manifestation (pen on canvas with mirror), Bharti has also made two installations.
One is titled The Artist’s Biography and is made of a shirt embellished with paper slips on the left side and photographs on the right.
“This is about how we as artists balance our personal and professional personas. While the paper slips on the left side contain inspirational quotes from artists and philosophers that are meant to guide us as we grow in this field, the right side reflects our personal lives and contains photographs of the memories we have created with our loved ones,” Bharti explains.
The second installation is a letterbox, which encloses letters written to God as part of a spiritual journey each of us would undertake as we grow older and wiser in the real world.
Spirituality is also the focus for Meeyong, a South Korean, who has made India his home for the last 10 years.
Older than the other three in the show, he took a break between his BFA (Class of 2009) and MFA (Class of 2012) to travel to the Himalayas, especially to Ladakh and Nepal. “My works are a reflection of my spiritual quest for understanding the mysteries of faith that I see unfolding before me through the lives of the common masses in India,” he says.
His works are divided into three series: Sacred Journey, Water Drops and The Tree. In the first two series, he works in oil on canvas creating the mountainscape of the Himalayas that he is so fond of, while imparting it with an otherworldly feel oscillating between reality and illusion.
As a monk walks towards the never-ending mountains, or a water drop falls from heaven, one feels lost in the serenity of Meeyong’s landscapes. In The Tree series, he works with the leaf of the Peepal tree, which he innocently calls the Bodhi tree, using each leaf as the representative symbol of Buddha’s spirituality. Twenty-four-year-old Swati has chosen to work in the medium of abstraction. In all her eight untitled oils on canvas, she creates landscapes inspired by her visit to Shantiniketan.
The colours are bright and reminiscent of the diversity in nature, but it is the textural element she imparts to her canvas that gives it a new language. “I was making a lot of still life when I went to Shantiniketan a year ago and continued to do so. But slowly the elements on my canvas started getting reduced till it became so minimal that every stroke was just like a splash of colour,” she says.
She does not plan how her work will evolve. “Art for me is a meditative process and my work reflects the peace
I get when I play with colours.”
Devyani works in the methodology of collages using threads, paper, cloth and pins, which is inspired by the artist’s understanding of the lost connection between people in urban lifestyles.
Her installation titled Touch Me, Touch Me Not, is like a cage
fitted with threads and wires.
As she explains, “Our fast-paced life has left us confined to our personal spaces where we are at times left with some found materials. Those textures became a part of my life and dealing with them every day invoked an inquisitiveness to explore them. In my paintings, each material has been given an individual identity, an indivi-dual voice.”