For nearly five decades, artist Paresh Maity has been painting landscapes not simply as views of places but as emotional encounters with them. And the boat has been a constant. “For me, the boat is a metaphor for life. You will notice that even when a boat is anchored, it is gently swaying. It has life in it. That is why I’m drawn to paint it over and over again,” says the Delhi artist. In his ongoing solo exhibition Luminous Terrains at Art Alive Gallery, Maity brings together a body of work that reads almost like a visual travel diary, tracing landscapes across India, Venice, and France.
The exhibition marks his next major public showing following the widely attended Infinite Light exhibition at Bikaner House in 2022. Yet Luminous Terrains is less a sequel and more a deepening of the artist’s lifelong dialogue with nature. Maity has long been drawn to places where landscape, culture, and memory intersect. And the canvases as always are monumental and filled with colours. “I like painting in the day because then you can capture the real beauty of light. Also, the scale excites me. It is difficult to work on a large scale. Your imperfections and mistakes become magnified. This is a challenge I love taking up each time,” says the 61-year-old artist.
I like painting in the day because then you can capture the real beauty of light. Also, the scale excites me. It is difficult to work on a large scale. Your imperfections and mistakes become magnified. This is a challenge I love taking up each timeParesh Maity, artist
Maity’s fascination with light echoes the explorations of European Impressionists—artists who sought to capture fleeting atmospheric conditions on canvas. Yet his interpretations remain distinctly his own. In his paintings of Venice and southern France, the light appears crisp and translucent, reflecting the clarity of Mediterranean skies. By contrast, the Indian landscapes carry a different intensity: light filtered through dust and heat, thickened by the density of land and air.
The artist’s sensitivity to landscape can be traced back to his childhood in Tamluk in West Bengal, a small town surrounded by rivers and open fields. As a child, he often walked along the banks of the Rupnarayan river sketching boats, trees, and changing skies. “Those early days taught me that light could transform an ordinary landscape into something dramatic and almost theatrical,” he says. That early fascination with atmosphere later shaped his training at the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata, where he studied painting but also began experimenting with sculpture and mixed media. “Not many know this, but I started my art life with clay sculptures,” he smiles.
In the new works, these encounters appear as vivid painterly impressions. The calm expanse of Dal Lake in Srinagar, the shimmering lagoons of Venice, the flowing Ganga along the ghats of Varanasi, the sunlit French Riviera, the vast deserts of Rajasthan and the rugged terrains of Madhya Pradesh, all surface in the exhibition. Maity translates their atmosphere—the stillness of water, the glare of desert light, the haze of river dust—into colour, texture and movement.
Among his most recognisable works is the Ganga series, inspired by repeated visits to Varanasi, where he would spend hours sketching the river at dawn. His Venice Watercolours capture the city’s fragile luminosity through swift washes of colour, while his Rajasthan desert landscapes explore heat and space through expansive bands of colour.
If Maity’s landscapes share a common thread, it is his persistent return to the same question: how to paint light. The answer, for him, lies not in a single technique but in the act of returning—to places, to memories, and to the shifting terrain of nature itself.