Artist Aparna Mohanty attempts to capture people and places in the city caught in the web of urbanisation in her paintings. Her canvasses are filled with a pulsating mix of colours and figures. Artist Aparna Mohanty's narrative paintings convey a sense of calm amid the chaos of daily life in a fast growing city.
For the last one decade, Aparna has been documenting people and life in Bhubaneswar and the city's evolution from being a green space to a place crammed with high rises. In her latest series 'Belongings to my City', her focus is on the places that continue to retain Bhubaneswar's old-worldly charm. Her canvas may be small, a little bigger than an A4 size paper, but Aparna brings it to life by filling it with the brightest of colours.
The artist is currently exhibiting her paintings at the Bhubaneswar-based BOCCA Cafe in a solo exhibition titled 'Agony, Ecstasy and Fantasy'. In a large orange canvas, she paints a small pond, which was once a large water body amidst coconut trees, now surrounded by high rises with people are still using it for bathing and washing clothes.
"You can still find such beautiful water bodies replete with lotus buds but due to the increasing number of buildings around them, they are getting squeezed and would probably cease to exist after some years," says the 35-year-old artist, who was born in the city and did her Bachelors in Visual Art from the Dhauli College of Art and Craft here.
In another painting, she draws a crowded colony where elderly men can be seen playing cards under the shade of a Peepal tree, children playing with marbles on the road and women buying fruits from a cart.The artist draws inspiration from different layers of life that exists in the city. In the series, she also draws a woman selling glass bangles in a small neighbourhood, people standing outside a shop to purchase chicken on a Sunday morning, a woman combing her hair outside the house, schoolgirls waiting for their turn at a crowded street side 'gupchup' shop or a person repairing umbrellas on the road - scenes that are a part of everyday life in many parts of the city.
"Scenes like these evoke a sense of nostalgia. Since I grew up in the city, I have noticed how it has evolved with people and I am reproducing those scenes through my art," says the painter, whose works are not very difficult to comprehend and her subjects are such that every common man can relate with them.A keen observer of her surroundings, she picks up scenes from markets, parks and similar places that see large human gatherings.
In another series, a small girl is her subject. While in some paintings, she draws the girl plucking white flowers, in another she portrays her cycling or jumping a rope. "This series is entirely dedicated to the girl child. I see many girls from both poor and rich backgrounds growing up in my neighbourhood. Seeing them play and grow up is a wonderful thing," says Aparna, who has participated in a number of group shows. In many of the other paintings, she shows women doing household chores or chatting.
Interestingly, all her paintings of women have urban landscape as setting. Technique wise, most of her works have been created with acrylic on canvas but many of them exude a watercolour charm. Having pursued Masters in visual art from the Utkal University of Culture, she also creates interesting pencil sketches. In other works, she has played around with blocks of white, blue, red, green and brown colours with thick brush strokes.