This is an article to introduce you and take you through my art journey.
I grew up in the city of Durgapur, in the eastern state of West Bengal in the Indian subcontinent. Durgapur is an industrial city about 170 km (105miles) to the south-east of the capital city of Kolkata. I moved to the USA in 2017 for pursuing my PhD in Environmental Engineering and currently, I stay in Maryland on the eastern coast.
My passion for art developed mostly by looking at my father who would often sit down with a paper and a pencil and sketch something or someone from life. My grandfather, I have heard, was a professional artist based in Calcutta. I never saw him myself. We lost him before I was born. But I saw my father. He once sketched my new-born baby cousin brother from life. I remember to have sat beside him the whole time while he worked. I saw his patience with every line and how much he enjoyed the process. I would never miss the chance of watching my father put covers on my new textbooks every time I was promoted to a new class. His work was a piece of art! He would measure the length of the paper needed for a book and cut off the piece from the roll with one neat stroke of the pen-knife. And then he would not touch the scissors or the knife. He minimized the number of scraps of paper by neatly folding the extra parts inside, in a way that there was no extra folds to be seen from the outside. My textbooks would be the most neatly covered ones in the entire class with marked labels on top. And yes, I took care of them too. Not one would have a mark on them until the end of the year! Soon, I learned, just by watching. My father would always help me with the covers whenever he could. With time, I had to assign him with more difficult things to do: the diagrams for my Biology class for example. He would stay up past midnight to finish them and keep them ready with neatly drawn arrows for me to finish the labeling in my handwriting.
I was always an indoors kid, who would never go out to play, introverted and shy. I always enjoyed staying home enclosed in a room full of blank papers around me. My father would very rarely buy ready-made cards on someone's birthday or Christmas! He would buy me a bunch of blank cards and ask me to fill them up! I did. And I enjoyed it so much! When I came of age, I was put under a tutor who taught me some techniques of painting with water-colors and ways to enhance the art of making cards. Soon, my parents found me humming some tunes at the back of my father's motorcycle. I would usually sit sandwiched between my father in the driver's seat and my mother at the back. And wherever we used to go, I would sing under my breath, these songs that I would hear on the television and picked up quite quickly. My parents thought I had a nice voice and I was put under another tutor for music and soon another for tabla, to keep me on my tempo. Gradually, I had no more time for painting. And soon, I had no more time to invest in my hobbies. In a middle-class Indian family, this is a very common scenario where, close to the tenth standard, kids are advised to focus more on academics than any other passion they might have.
I think I started painting again when I came here to the USA in 2017. I started saving some money from my monthly student stipend to invest in supplies. With time, I have been able to set up a mini-studio worth of supplies and make some progress on the quality and quantity of my work. I find myself motivated to create every time I feel saturated with my research or life in general and find solace when I channelize all the negativity into creating something.
I am mostly self-taught, nowhere close to a professional. I have however, made some gifts for my friends. Some of them, very kind ones, got back to me asking if I was willing to draw something for them if they paid for it. I have accepted art commissions for very special cases because I felt they would not be too disheartened if I made mistakes. I think I want to do it for myself and for the love of the process at this point and not get swayed by the business side of things.
I hope you enjoy the pieces you see here and let me know what you think of them. :)