Sumanto Chowdhury’s works take you on a stroll through the winding alleyways of small-town India. Brightly-coloured houses huddle along narrow lanes, surrounded by trees, grass and rocks. The charming mixed-media paintings, currently on display at Artworld, combine colour pencils, watercolours and acrylics, etching and lithography to create a uniquely-layered, 3D effect.
“I’m inspired by the rural cities in Andhra Pradesh, such as Nizampur, and also by the colourful Portuguese architecture in Goa,” says the young, up-and-coming Hyderabad-based artist. “I use elements from both to create a fantasy landscape of my own making.”
The influences are clear in the delicately detailed doorways and windows, with their old-fashioned, Mughal-style grills and patterns, and the bright reds, pinks and yellows of the buildings, reminiscent of stained-glass paintings. “The doors and windows are very important to me, as they are the point of entry into the painting, from which you can see the entire landscape,” he says.
The artist, who trained in Santiniketan before moving to Hyderabad 11 years ago, is inspired by his mentor K. Laxma Goud. “He always encourages me to experiment with different media,” says Chowdhury. In the past two years, he’s taken that experimentation to the next level with his layered 3D paintings. The background of the landscape is in delicate pastel watercolours or pencils, the foreground in bright acrylics, and a subtle 3D effect is created by raising the doors, balconies and shutters off the canvas or by using multiple plates of zinc-plate etching to create a sense of depth and perspective.
Adding an additional level of complexity to the works is how Chowdhury plays with whitespace; the painting as a whole, appears to be cut into the canvas, occasionally bleeding out onto the white. “I’m always looking to embed variously shaped forms into whitespace,” he comments.
But the appeal of his works is that the final product is not complex or obtuse. These are very accessible paintings, imbued with both a sepia-toned nostalgia and a bubble gum-coloured modern sensibility that is easy to relate to. This is true also of Chowdhury’s sculptures, where he takes his 3D experimentation to its logical conclusion — his wooden house and cow are all in bright colours, with fine detailing and patterning. Chowdhury says he next plans to work on large fibre-glass sculptures, beginning with that ubiquitous denizen of semi-rural India, the cow.
This is the artist’s first showing in Chennai. The exhibition is on till August 9.
