Art and Nature
Henry Matisse has once said “An artist must possess nature. He must identify himself with his rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language”
Using woods, leaves, charcoal, clay, graphite, sand, stones in an artwork is in trend these days. Regardless of technology becoming so advanced, depicting nature and using natural materials to produce an artwork can never go out of league. We can never divide ourselves from nature. Bringing awareness among people regarding environmental issues, depicting nature’s beauty though art, providing aesthetic pleasure is the major role of portraying nature in arts.
Art Alive Gallery in its past few exhibitions have showcased works of various artists from different parts of India, featuring their paintings, installations, and other artworks illustrating the beauty and complexity of nature.
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, is one of India’s pioneering second-generation artists from the Pardhan Gond tradition. His works has been showcased widely, including in the National Gallery of Canada and participated in international Symposia in Italy, USA, UK and Australia. In his show at the Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi he has displayed his love and concern for the nature through his works. He has shown his attachment with the environment and said “Earlier there was green everywhere you looked but now, no more. There is a rapid deforestation that is devastating our land, riverbeds are turning dry and animals and birds are starving. Unless we address this crisis immediately, it will be too late. Prakriti is our teacher, we need to respect and protect our environment”
Suman Chandra did his M.F.A. (Painting) and B.F.A. (Painting) from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University. He is interested in site specific works. He use sand, coal, charcoal etc. to depict his attachment and interest in the coal mines and shows the continuous shifting and changing happening in different layers within the earth which is caused mainly by humans.
Another young talented artist, Purvai Rai studied at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. She is a graphic designer, textile designer and a multimedia artist whose work revolves around stories, memories, and identity; social inclusion driven practice. She works with natural materials like jute, cotton and yarn which acts as a medium of storytelling in her artwork, as layers of fibers uncover personal narratives that hoard with passing of time. She believes that much like a photograph, a piece of fabric also captures the essence of many moments in our life.
Lakshmi Srinath has a degree in Fine Arts from Stella Maris College, Chennai. She works in a mixed media and her works have a character of assembling tantric symbols, doors, textiles, threads, jasmine, flowers and many other elements derived mainly from tradition. She channelizes her creative energies. The internalization of traditions and conventions observed ritualistically within her family emerged and evolved gradually to translate as abstract concepts. Her imagery derives from the environment of the temples or is inspired by the temple’s constituent form of its architecture. Which is made out of wooden structures.
Kirti Chandak on the other hand works with paper pulp and fashioning varieties of leaves, pods to mark her strong connectivity to nature. She did her bachelors in Fine Arts from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharti, Shantiniketan, West Bengal 1992 – 1997. Masters of Fine Arts from Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda 1997 – 1995. Her play with textures and forms dominate her creative process, articulating with every found element as seeds, stones, stem, and bark etc. enabling visualization of ideas that connects her life to nature and culture.
