Striking a perfect balance of the warm and cool color scheme is Basukinath Das Gupta’s painting. The art work sees an outstanding rendezvous of contemporary art with tribal leanings. The rich play of mixed media includes cloth, hard board, acrylic paint, oil paint, and white paint. The unerring blend of colors and the play of shadows, gives rise to the ‘Chiaroscuro’ effect. Indian-ness is vivid, as Basukinath Das Gupta contemporaries’ folk figures, using the colors of the earth. His works are a pertinent exemplar of east meeting west.
Basuki is a graduate of Shanti Niketan school of Fine Arts. He initially experimented with materials terrecota before moving his creations onto canvas board. To this he comments, "the relief, the richness of my mural practice and bishnupur terracotta forced me to go to a physical relief pattern instead of a flat canvas. And I feel its textured surface, its juxtaposed colors are the echoes of my mind. This expressions, give me an aesthetic pleasure when I become tired of today's materialistic world."
About the tribal quality of his work, Basuki states, "I am very much a part of 'folk' I born and brought up in a folk environment. I lived with folk rituals, folk dance, music and drama, art and literature... I feel folk is more down to earth, where art is an intergrated part of life and no way it is 'alien' to that particular society. Folk, I feel is more honest and direct to its society and people... I believe in our moving tradition and the way I express, the language I paint is very much contemporary, with all the contemporary vibration...
In general a particular 'Folk 'belongs to a particular small area, I too live in a small area called 'India'." |
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