`City beautiful' captured in all its hues

`City beautiful' captured in all its hues

The Hindu

A group of artists try to recreate the magic of old Bangalore on the canvas at an art camp


Bangalore: This is not about painting the town red. This is about painting the town in all its varied hues, its lively colours, its dynamic contours, and its people in all their splendour. This is about a set of artists getting together for an art camp to capture Bangalore on canvas, to grab its verve in a million colours.

Here's the rationale for the topic of a city: "Bangalore has a big burden of carrying software companies and other multinationals on its shoulders, and this has brought, and is still bringing about tremendous changes in its infrastructure. Every street is undergoing constant change, and every beautiful old bungalow is being destroyed to build huge flats," said one of the participating artists.

Artists Dhiraj Chowdary, Gurudas Shenoy, Shankar Kendale, Bharati Sagar, Kamalesh Chowdhary, Nikhil Ranjan Pal and Gregory Lent have all captured Bangalore's remembered landscape, positing a nostalgic view. Milind Nayak, J.M.S. Mani and G. Subramanyam have contributed too.

The artists have attempted to recapture the essence of old Bangalore for the old Bangalorean, who was either born here or came to settle down to enjoy the trees and is now confused. The old Bangalorean is trying to come to grips with the fact that the old city is now being replaced by a new hellish commercial city. In the new city, the relations among individuals are merely of contractual value.

Each artist came to the camp with his own preoccupation, but had to change his subject or integrate his own subject with the given subject, in this case, the city.

From street scenes to buildings to people, the artists have painted Bangalore in all its variety. The camp, as a participant put it, fostered a relationship of artists to themselves and directed them to define themselves in relation to the city. At the end of the camp, the artists came to work on a huge painting together. A painting of five panels, each artist chose a portion of the canvas and integrated it with the rest.

Each artist came with his own style and put it alongside the other. It was the artists coming together to make a grand statement of integrating various styles and preoccupations to make one painting. Painters merged into one painter, and styles different from one another merged into a grand canvas to make a single statement.

The event was conceived by Dhiraj Chowdhary who wanted to create good enthusiasm for art and artists in Bangalore. The event coincided with his own major retrospective in the city, held simultaneously at the Time and Space Art Gallery and the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath Gallery.

An exhibition of the artists' works is now on at the Westminster Gallery in Windsor Manor.

The crowds gathered at the launch on Wednesday were able to conjure up how old Bangalore looked. The works of art surely looked professional, although the artists had only four days to complete them.