This oil work of hers is giving Jayasri Burman a bout of worry. For, its size is a bit too big—four feet by eight feet—forcing her to bend over the canvas with the brush. “It is an intricate work,” she says, sitting at her colonial table. A few days earlier, the 50-year-old artist had talked of pain in her back. “I think I will go to my studio for a few days,” she had then said to her painter-husband, Paresh Maity. Both of them have separate studios in Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park, the refuge of bhadralok Bengalis in the national capital.
Till not very long ago, they too lived in the genteel but claustrophobic environment of Chittaranjan Park affords, but their three-level house in Greater Kailash, also in Delhi, has been specially commissioned “like a Kolkata baari” with very high ceilings and huge doors. Windows overlook the park and let in a quality of light that, for creative artists, is a delight. No wonder Jayasri has opted to paint from her first floor fiefdom here, a television screen showing her various interior and exterior sections of the house under security camera surveillance so she can monitor the staff going about their work and check incoming visitors from the confines of what she calls her puja room. That space, in reality, is only the most recent of her “travelling studios”.
You have to leave your footwear downstairs before ascending to her first-floor temple-studio. The wooden temple here is ancient, one of several such finds that the artist couple have used throughout their home. The basement is strewn with everything from art to furniture they have picked up on their travels around the country and the world. The image in the temple is of a Durga painted by Jayasri. Lamps are lit before the goddess.
She looks up from her canvas— downstairs. Paresh is entertaining a visitor. She passes instructions to the cook, and the guest is served ginger tea, jam sandwiches (to which Paresh is addicted) and shammi kebabs. Lunch, a little while earlier, was maach-bhaat. Jayasri ate lightly— she has to still complete that painting. It is distressing, if only she didn’t enjoy painting.
On the stairs leading from the ground floor to her temple-studio is a painting by Jogen Chowdhury, probably the largest work of the artist. Elsewhere, there are works by K G Subramanyam and Jamini Roy, and snaps by Jayasri’s fashion photographer- son. Naturally, paintings by Jayasri and Paresh dominate.
Jayasri’s personality was artistically tempered in her childhood—after all her uncle is the painter-lithographer Sakti Burman of Paris. And though she attempted her hand at different styles, and is moved to tears and joy by the works of the masters, her marriage to Paresh rooted her style in a jewelled glow of colours, details and the world of goddesses and angels, of mythic tales and radiance. Such as the canvas she is currently toiling on. A work, which Jayasri describes as, of “love, peace and harmony”. It features mothers and children—a favourite subject of Jayasri’s— in close contact, playing together, being companions. “Just as angels are in our life,” she says.
Then she takes a break—as she must every time the doorbell rings, or the servants want to know what to cook for dinner, what about the dhobi’s hisaab, the driver wants to take a day-off.… She gets up to make sure the lamps before Durga are lit, pausing to fold her hands. In that instant, she looks like Saraswati: the goddess of her studio and her art, in the temple of her own creation.