The late master, Bikash Bhatacharjee’s son and daughter Bivas and Balaka will be showing their art works in Mumbai for the very first time at a city exhibition. Chatting up with After Hrs in Mumbai, the brother-sister duo is clearly highly influenced by their father.
While Balaka is a painter, Bivas works in the medium of photography but he insists that his photographs are like paintings. And while talking about their father, Balaka says, “The most precious lesson that my father has taught me is to be honest. He used to always tell me to paint and create only what I really, really like.” She adds, “In art, trends come and go and many artists try hard to fit in with these trends even if they don’t really like them. This is done out of insecurity. But my father has always insisted that we should practice what we want to.”
For Bivas too, his father was the one who gifted him, his very first photograph. “My father was an avid photographer and he gave me a camera when I was very young and since then my love affair with photographs began.” He continues, “I have grown up watching paintings all my life and hence I make my photographs also look like paintings.”
In this ongoing exhibition, Balaka (means bird in Bengali) has shifted focus from birds, insects and human figures to landscape. “I love nature and feel one with it. My series of recent works has been inspired by a train ride I took in the picturesque countryside of France. It was so beautiful and I was overwhelmed with the magnanimity of nature and also felt mystical with the thought that it has a treasure trove of so many secrets. I have tried to capture all of this in my works.”
Bivas’ works are more inclined towards spirituality. “I have tried to communicate my experience of meditating through different images. And captions of my works also play a very important role. They are very jarring and makes the viewer think,” ends Bivas.
Catch the exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery till November 8.
Comments
