A Tale of Two Artists
Subarnarekha Pal
My dream is to become an old book,
A very old book,
With brown, crumbling pages
And dead wildflowers inside.
Subarnarekha Pal is a poet, illustrator and of course, an Instagram specialist. She likes to believe she is an independent thinker, art enthusiast, and jammer of poetry. Amidst all of this, she also struggles to be an artist.
Suspirium
In fairytales of old, spells makes the prince frog, on the other hand spells awake the entire sleeping kingdom. Here under the spell of the two-faced king they became the square-headed ones. They are bound to the words, letters uttered by the king’s tongue. Someone, in there, has probably spent their entire life to find a counter spell. May be you, who is looking at this, are the one he has been waiting for.
Tree/Botgachh
Flow of time..
Faces that we meet
Faces that fade
Faces we remember
Faces we forget.
Time flows through
The veins of this juggernaut.
Anonymous 1/Anonymous 2
These two form a folk story together.
It’s disappointing how the story doesn’t have a beginning or an end. Or, maybe, we are just too blind to read it properly. The anonymous storyteller is perhaps slouching in their cane armchair in some anonymous corner of the world. The bird spirits here are probably the symbol for liberation. The spirits are watching you too. Pray to them. You, too, need salvation.
Srijani Kundu
Before I even pick up the paintbrush I already know that flowers are the art of nature . A flower has the power to make our heart soar, bring a smile on your face and evoke a fragrance of a special memory of new beginnings or make us sigh or weep. The sense it evoked in my memory since childhood was almost unforgettable. It’s almost like a fun challenge when it comes to colour and form.
Srijani Kundu is a young art enthusiast who is obsessed with the medium gouache. Having taken up the brushes during the lockdown, she has finally found her niche now. She is currently pursuing Master’s in English literature.
Sunset Boulevards
Sunsets are mysterious because becuase they present such fascinating contradictions. Almost like an art palette. The dramatic blend of the warm and cold colours convey a sense of calmness, yet still retain a delicious sense of mystery about them. It conveys this sense of the infinite, the sublime.
Similarly, the grandeur of the limitless flower fields too, evoke a subtle sense of joy within me. It is this joy I try to capture in my landscape art.
My paintings are not the reflection of real life, rather an impression of what a flower, a landscape, a certain atmosphere or an object has left on my mind and this impression transcends time.
Using thick short brush strokes of broken colours in immediate juxtaposition mostly by trying to focus on capturing the fleeting environment and how we see the world. By using a myriad of broken colours which optically blend together when viewed from a distance like we see in most impressionist paintings.
The medium that I mostly use while painting landscape is gouache as it gives a bright and a matte finish to the whole painting. I’ve used gouache colours from brustro and flash paints. Gouache/ body colour or opaque watercolour is a water medium paint consisting of natural pigment and water as a binding agent . Gouache is more opaque than watercolour. Dries up faster than watercolour and gives a creamy , flat finish that can be used to create texture.
Valley of Flowers
A flower has the power to make our heart soar, bring a smile on your face and evoke a fragrance of a special memory of new beginnings or make us sigh or weep. It is at once a joy, and a challenge to paint flowers, and I revel in it.
I often use acrylics in thick strokes of mixed and unmixed colours to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration. For giving it a 3D effect I have used acrylic colours from flash paints generally available on Amazon. The texture is almost thick and quite satisfactory. It is water soluble, when wet it can be used with watercolour brushes. It dries into a quite plasticky and opaque texture.