The drama contiunes…

Next Gen Pen Brush Ink on Paper

… as I celebrate 50 years in Canada with a solo show of my paintings and drawings at the historic Arts&Letters Club of Toronto, from May 31, 2024 to June 22, 2024.

I have always seen black and white in colour, etched at times in my mind, at others on paper. The stories represent different dimensions and decades of my life, when solitude was populated with vibrant fantastical stories and myths, which needed a visual landscape.

First a small sketchbook, then a larger one, a brush or two, one pen, nibs in two or three sizes, a bottle of the inimitable Indian ink, a piece of plywood hoisted on four legs, a tiny corner in a small room, two tiny beings asleep, and a mind which wandered in the past and present. A hidden eye straddled my childhood in the ancient land of India, and womanhood and motherhood in Canada, a new world created upon an old one.

In the depth of night, I communed with words and forms and discovered unknown emotions, captured silent, elusive moments, and one-dimensional thoughts came alive. Wisps and flows, layers and lines and blocks of black and white became forms and structures. Familiar objects from fragments of a distant past were juxtaposed with dreams and images of tomorrow – unreal, funny, absurd, fractured glimpses of horses, men and women, watching, waiting, cityscapes and steeple-like buildings, stumbling, yet erect, and steps leading into the unknown.

One day, the unknown became apparent, when jurors selected the sketches for national competitions. This created a new narrative and need in me. The feel of paper is irreplaceable, but projecting black and white on canvas was the next step into the known. Showing the sketches and the mirrored canvases together at the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto is the culmination of a long-held desire. This is where the Group of Seven held their first show. This is also the same venue where, in 1914, an Arts & Letters Club of Toronto founder, Roy Matthews Mitchell, an ardent theosophist, produced a famous play, The Post Office, by my favorite Bengali writer, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven acted in it, and it so happens, I played the main role of the child, Amal, in the same play at All India Radio in my other life.

Eye Storm Batik on Fabric

I am not sure when my mother’s dream became mine, but the memory of sitting with a hand-held easel, some crayon, and a teacher Abani Sen, who instilled in me the fine art of skill and imagination, is implanted in my consciousness. Fittingly, one of his paintings is in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.

And … the drama continues in my exhibition of paintings and drawings, Theatre Unlimited.