Meeting Paresh Maity at Sunaina Anand's Art Alive Gallery in Panchsheel Enclave, New Delhi , was pure pleasure. He was there well before the appointed time, which was 11.30 am. Dressed in black, this dark, diminutive man with a twinkle in his eye made us feel at home at once. Before we got down to conversing about his life and work we, Anoop Kamath, progenitor of www.mattersofart.com and I were taken on a guided tour of the gallery which had on display most of the works from Paresh Maity's show, which begins on March 26, 2008.
The large watercolours done on his recent trip to Kerala have his characteristic verve and vividness of colour. They are joyous paintings, with the sea, boats, elephants, kathakali dancers, village huts and, in certain cases, plantains forming the pictorial motif. The forthcoming show contains fifty works, many of them large. This is his fiftieth solo show. He is forty-three.
Maity first visited Kerala in 1986, with three friends from the Government College of Arts and Craft, Kolkata, and three others who also joined the party. In his words, “We reached there in high and heavy monsoon.” He was fascinated by the backwaters and did a lot of watercolours on his first trip.
The state of Kerala caught his imagination and he made several trips from 2002 to 2007, travelling extensively across the state. The places include Ernakulam and Kochi , Thiruvananthapuram, Kottayam, Alapuzha, Thekkadi, Munnar, Wynaad and Kozhikode . “We travelled by boat and houseboat, accessed remote places with waterways through the backyards of people's houses. I painted watercolours on the spot.”
His subjects include the people of the state, festivals, animals and the effect of the monsoons. Those works, and even his recent works, have a dramatic charge which, at the same time, is shot through with genuine poetry.
Asked about the play of light in his work, he replies, “Light has always played an important role in my life. I have always painted in natural light, usually during the day, never after 5.30 or6 pm. I usually made an early start.”
The play of light on objects, the human figure or the landscape, has always fascinated him. “We see objects because of light. Even the darkness is transparent.” He saw English artist Henry's Moore 's monumental sculptures, first in books, and then on his first trip to the UK and Europe in 1990, instigated by a friend from the Business World who had lived in Calcutta for twelve years. This friend, who said, “The most important things in life are education and exposure”, took him to a travel agent and made all the arrangements for his journey.
The play of light on Moore 's sculptures convinced Maity of the importance of light in painting and sculpture. He elucidates: “Even in our miniature paintings, light – through the gradations of colour – plays an important part. Even drawings have light. For instance, when we draw two trees, the one nearer is deeper and the one farther away is lighter, merging into the vanishing point.”
At college, the teachers laid great stress on learning the craft of painting and sculpture. “If we did not do five sketches every day and a drawing from life study, we were not allowed to sit the exams.” As a child from Tamluk, a small town 90 km from Kolkata, he was riveted by the work of the clay modellers who came every year to fashion the idol of the Mother Goddess during Durga pooja. He picked up the techniques from them and became an expert modeller himself. He even managed to sell his pieces in clay. So much so that it infuriated his strict father who predicted that he would end up as a signboard painter.
Paresh was always a good student and, despite his father's dire predictions about his future, managed to get into Hamilton High School , the leading institution in the 24 Parganas. It was the same school that Khudiram Bose, the child political martyr, went to in the early part of the century. There was a teacher who had been to Night Art College . It was a place where people from other professions went to pursue their private passions for art. This gentleman brought a lot of art books the National Library in Kolkata to show his students. Young Paresh benefited immensely from looking at reproductions of Dutch still lifes and beautiful landscapes from various European schools in these books.
After his 12 th class exams he ran away from home for a month to Delhi , but returned to appear for the entrance exam to the Government College of Art and Craft. At 18, he was admitted. He made the 208 km from Tamluk to Kolkata and back every day, “without missing a single day, or even being late for class.”.He worked extremely hard, was loved by his teachers and made the most of what his environment had to offer him.
In 1989, he came for his Master of Fine Arts to Delhi . Here he was able to cut loose. The craft he had so assiduously learnt in Kolkata now allowed him the freedom he desired. He took to sculpture with gusto and learnt a good deal. He had actually come to Delhi to exhibit his paintings, not to study. He managed to sell 23 paintings but allowed to be persuaded by senior artists to join the MFA course. Until 1989, he was hugely into landscape painting. Then he went to England on a scholarship and studied the works of Turner and Constable and saw their works in the National Gallery.
On his return to Delhi Maity took to sculpture again and displayed two large pieces in bronze of 250 kgs each in Bangalore last year (but cast in Delhi). He has always been at home with sculpture. He cannot speak enough of the ancient temple sculptures, especially Madurai in Tamil Nadu.
Maity first handled clay as a child and then during his MFA in Delhi did a five-foot tall piece in clay. He has not always been pursue his love for sculpture as it involves many people and is time-consuming. Maity remembers with gratitude his teacher Sreepal whose foundry is now run by his son.
It was at the age of 14 that he realised during an on-the-spot painting competition that painting was what he wanted to do more than anything else, and he wanted to do it for the rest of his life. That is precisely what he handsomely succeeded in doing with his lyrical response to light, which he has employed to great effect to bring alive people and places.
Indeed it is painting for which Maity will be remembered. After his Rajasthan trip in 1990, the human figure came into his work in a substantial way. In these troubled time he paints with a joie de vivre that gives the sceptics a hard time. He had his first solo show in 1989 when a student, courtesy Lady Ranu Mukherjee, a great patron of the arts. Now, 19 years later, amid much criticism and adulation, he is about to embark on his fiftieth solo show. |
