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CHENNAI: Her canvas is an extension of her soul and there her creative spirit resigns. Meet the Chennai-based artist Darshana Bajaj, who has always been interested in art. “I spent several years after college trying to fit into, first, the world of advertising as a copy writer, then as an interior designer, before finally accepting my calling to be an artist in 2003,” she says. She was 30 at the time.
We ask her how her practice has changed over time, and she says, “From illustrative, it has become expressive…from the purely representational to the abstract, and then on to the semi-abstract. It has also moved from the outer to inner,” she smiles. With a few insightful successes, she also admits to having had great disasters. “It is a birthing, or a becoming that’s still very much in progress,” she says.
Her first series in 2005 was titled ‘Faith’, which depicted ordinary people going about their jobs even when things looked far from promising. “Keeping faith is what I needed the most at the time as an artist,” she says. Her current series, titled ‘What flows through you, flows through me too’, carries forward the
thought of soul searching. She uses text here for the first time to show that beyond the obvious inanities lay the subtle truths.
Darshana works with oils, acrylics and water colours. “I love the richness of oil paints; they’re my all-time favourite. I keep going back to them.” She considers herself to be a great colourist and doesn’t shy away from experimenting with different combinations of hues. “I even limit myself to using a couple of colours sometimes, as in my painting titled ‘Blues’.
Painting is living, and everything else is waiting.”
So what does she attempt to communicate through her canvas? “My work usually reflects the place I’m in, personally and spiritually. But mostly, I communicate the sheer joy of art, colours and being who you really are,” she smiles.
Check out artist Darshana Bajaj’s work at an exhibition at Ambassador Pallava until December 15
