Naishitha Kasarla’s paintings have a photographic quality to them. The setting, the subjects and their expressions are realistic. “I try to keep my paintings as real as possible,” she says.
The emerging artist is excited about her solo show at Iconart gallery, Palleku Podamu (Let’s go to the village), which she terms a metaphorical journey into the rural past of Telangana. Naishita has always grown up in an urban surrounding, but has heard anecdotes and seen photographs of life in the rural and semi-rural regions of Telangana from her parents and others known to the family. She was intrigued and wanted to explore the countryside. “I didn’t know about folk arts like the Burrakatha. It was fascinating to learn about native culture and practices,” she says.
Through her paintings, she captures the relaxed pace of life in a village, women working in the fields with a smile on their lips, an elderly man walking by, festivities like Bathukamma and Bonalu filled with colour, and a decked up Gangireddu doing the rounds during Sankranti. “We, in the city, wake up each morning and are in a hurry to get to work. I like how people live close to nature in the villages and savour what they do in a day,” she says.
A self-taught artist, Naishitha took to art after completing her engineering. The shift was inevitable, she reflects, “I had always been drawn to art. Soon after engineering, I contemplated taking a fine arts course but that would have meant another five years in college.” She took up a diploma in interior designing and followed it up with an internship for a year. Yet, the gnawing desire to see if she had the potential to be an artist got the better of her. “I decided to put everything aside and learn art,” she says.
Her first solo show, Nature’s Pirouette, was in 2014. Then, she began working on a documentary project Canvas Hyderabad with her uncle and artist Sundeep Muppidi, Associate Dean for Academic Planning and Curriculum, and Professor of Communication, University of Hartford, USA. “We wanted to find out if art in Hyderabad has a unique style of its own and compare it with an international scenario. When we talk of native art in this region, inevitably we turn to art that’s representative of rural Telangana,” she says. Canvas Hyderabad is a work in progress, “We have recorded interviews with leading artists including Laxma Goud, Vaikuntam and Surya Prakash among others. The scripting work is on, it’s taking us some time since my uncle and I are working in different countries.”
