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| By Madhusree Chatterjee |
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Friday, June 26, 2009 (12:47:19) |
| Tags : Art, Painting, India |
Girl with Husain's brush and mature strokes
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| New Delhi: Eleena Banik, a Kolkata-based contemporary artist is often dubbed the "girl with Husain's brush".
Her world changed one day in 1998 when M.F. Husain came to Kalabhavan in Shantiniketan in West Bengal to receive the Deshikottama award. Eleena was then a sixth year fine arts student.
"He was moving in a group of senior artists and black cat commandos. The artist was carrying a huge brush that was as big as a walking stick. It was a German brush. I walked up to him and asked why he was carrying such a big brush. He gave me the brush and said 'keep it'," Eleena told media at the Visual Arts Gallery in the India Habitat Centre on Thursday, where her solo exhibition, "My Voice, Against Violence as a Woman", opened on Wednesday.
Husain autographed the "brush" and subsequently visited Eleena's studio in Kolkata later. "He told my father, 'you have a talented daughter' and my teacher, artist Jogen Chowdhury that 'Eleena has grown up'. Later he mentioned me as a budding talent to the Kolkata media," Eleena recalled.
Husain and his brush proved the midas touch. That year, the art fraternity rained its bounty on Eleena with three awards, including the President's award, a gold medal from AIFACS Gallery in New Delhi and a silver medal by the West Bengal government.
"I was very young and he was like a king," Eleena said.
Eleena, whose works are influenced by the great European masters and the 19th century modernists, draws her experience of being a woman, sensuality, everyday trauma, violence, street rage, hospitals and social turbulence.
She often picks up her themes from the compositions of great romantic poets like John Keats and William Wordsworth and scribbles stray verses in her works.
Her mediums are diverse from monochrome oils to conte (crayon), charcoal and tempera on papers, plywood and canvas. Eleena casts her sculptures in bronze. Her figures are stark conveying death and decay in almost every frame. But the women are strong.
The show ends on June 29. (IANS) |
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