How green is my valley, Deepti Naval

As musician Seema Sehgal rendered Dogri melodies, you could see the world of Munsiyari coming alive at the Osmosis art gallery in the city. Munsiyari, a small town in the Pittohragarh district of Uttarakhand has been captured in photographs by former actor and now artist, poet and photographer, Deepti Naval.

Deepti is a self-confessed wanderer and takes off on long trips all over the country, most of the time alone. She says, “I do that quite often and usually my art works portray these places. This time, however, there are people in my works. I suddenly wanted to be around people after wandering alone for a long time.”

Deepti had her first exhibition of paintings back in 1978 during her college days in USA when she was studying art. And her greatest inspiration to take up art was her mother. She says, “As kids, my parents would take me to Kullu Manali and my mother would paint the landscapes there.”

Deepti has showed her works in New York, London, Delhi and in other cities as well but the show that is closest to her heart is her first-ever in India at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1995. She recalls, “I had 43 works on display. Just before the exhibition, I spent a lot of time by my own. So, there were a lot of  hard hitting self-portraits and rigorously painted mountainscapes amongst others.”

Currently, she is working on an ambitious project of capturing the valley of Kashmir in several seasons and vivid moods. “ The first ever picture I took was in the valley back in 1978, when I had just come back from USA. For me, it’s sort of a completion of a cycle,” explains Deepti. She continues, “When I began to act, I thought I will shoot in Kashmir but I never got any role or any film that was being shot there.”

The artist’s current show at Osmosis art gallery in Juhu runs up to February 27.