These days, life’s little vignettes end up on social media and thirst for appreciation. However, a painter here chose to lend her experiences a bit more subtlety and poured them on canvas. The result — an exhibition titled Autumn Bruises, which is on at the Museum auditorium here.
Babitha Marina Justin has included in her first solo exhibition snippets from her many journeys as well as from her personal life. The people she met during her travels across India, her loved ones, and her own perception of the masks she dons as part of life come alive on her works.
Perhaps her skills as a writer and poet have spilled on to canvases, where each person strikes the viewer as a character from a story that begs to be narrated. Be it a Drukpa woman from Ladakh or a lone man against a backdrop of menhirs at Nartiang, a village in Meghalaya, their lively eyes are magnetic.
Some of her works seem to be right out of a children’s picture-book, depicting idyllic scenes of Kashmiri women in a field of mustard flowers and men sawing wood. Babitha says she has tried to capture the mundaneness that masks the turmoil in areas like Kashmir.
The exhibition, which comprises 35 oil paintings, got its title from the fact that she took up painting in the autumn of her life, she says. A published author and a scholar of English language and literature, Babitha has been learning to paint for around two years, under the instruction of artist Shaji Palkulangara, who also teaches her sons.
Painting for her was an unfulfilled childhood dream that she had hoped to fulfill through her sons. But soon she came around to pursuing it herself. Babitha is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) here.
Autumn Bruises, which was inaugurated on Friday, is on till Monday.
