HYDERABAD: Celebrated Indian artist Atul Dodiya is making the most of his quarantine. He believes that the lockdown is the best excuse to be a recluse. For the recent edition of the Indulge Time Pass webinar — which engages some of the best minds of the country to help us keep up with the new normal- the artist tells host Kaveree Bamzai that for the first two and a half months of the quarantine, he focused on spending time with his family and re-watching some cinematic masterpieces.
Incidentally, the artist’s wife Anju, an acclaimed abstract artist, and their daughter Biraaj, just showcased her debut solo show in Kolkata earlier this year. Dodiya reveals that he enjoys the current lack of professional commitments to galleries and has just started going back to his studio to work in solace. The artist tells Bamzai that the pastoral quality in his work has always been about unraveling the sense of solitariness which we are all experiencing now.
“Most of my work has been about a solitary figure looking out at a cloud, sky or mountains. Nature is always changing, I have found a freedom in depicting that aspect of nature. Somehow it also talks about us being stuck, like we all are confined to our homes now, how we see the world through a window. I have been a fan of Indian miniature paintings and pre-Renaissance masters, so my work has always been somewhat pastoral, they don’t look very contemporary,” said Dodiya. “Tomorrow if there’s a vaccine, things may get back to normal,” he adds.