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Woman is the most popular
subject of art. There exists no artist who has not painted women at
least at some point of their life. But women are not depicted in the
same way everywhere. In Bengal the primary goddess in Devi Durga and
Bengali culture gives a very high position to women. Artists like
Ababnindranath Tagore
had
tried to portray women mostly in the role of mother.
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Abanindranath
Tagore's famous painting Bharat Mata, where he equates woman to
mother and mother to motherland.
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Ravindranath Tagore
on the other hand had shown women in a more down to earth form.
Modern day painters who have seen the emergence of women as equal to men
have shown women in a less mystifying form than before.
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Sunil Das's woman
figures do not show any element of fantasy. they ratehr show the
ugliness that might exist in a woman's life. |
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In Paresh Maity's
works women are even shown in openly sexual contexts. In works of
Devajyoti Ray
, an even
younger painter, women are seen in modern attire, practically poised
without any element of fantasy.
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Paresh Maity's
women in a sexula context. |
Devajyoti Ray's
demystified modern woman |
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Paresh Maiti, like Maya Burman,
Devajyoti Ray and
Shakila is one of the younger masters
of Indian art today. he has often been referred these days as
the new face of Indian Art. He was born in 1965. After graduating
from the
Government College of Art
and Crafts
, Kolkata, Maiti shifted his
base to Delhi where he completed MFA from the College of Art and then
straight away went into exhibiting his works.
But Paresh Maity had not learnt art only from the
institutions. He had artists among his relatives some of whom
like Shakti Burman,Maya Burman,
Jayashree Burman are today important painters.
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Maity is an
immensely talented and hard working man as he can produce art works at
great pace and he is probably the only artist in India who has produced
such a huge volume of works in such a short span of time. Paresh Maiti
has put up more than forty solo exhibitions in India and abroad in a
short span of time.
Initially Maity had started with water-colours but later he
almost abandoned water-color works and started making
paintings in oil. Maity's oil works are easily distinguishable
as most of these have a central woman figure which Paresh
calls the Nayika. The whole painting then shows some aspect of
this woman's life.
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Paresh Maity's water
color work (left) and his new oil on canvas work (right) showing
character Nayika |
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Medium and Technique of
Works
Paresh Maiti started with
water colours on very large pieces of
paper which had caught the attention of art lovers almost
instantly. But later Maiti shifted towards
oil on canvas
when he painted ethnically dressed women
involved in household activities
Major Themes
Paresh Maiti’s themes vary with the medium he uses.
In water colours, he paints mostly water-scapes with boats. But in oil
and acrylic, Maiti uses flat colours to depict women in ethnic dresses.
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