A Painter’s Portrait

Director: K. Bikram Singh
Featured Artists: Jogen Chowdhury, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Gogi Saroj Pal, Amitava Das and Manu Parekh

October 8, 2003 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Contemporary Indian painting—dazzlingly vibrant, diverse, constantly evolving—is, after all, full of fascinating puzzles. What is it that Jogen Chowdhury owes to Swedish film meister Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries? To what extent does the accomplished poet in Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh impact the artist in him, or vice-versa? Did the long years she spent in a one-room dwelling in Old Delhi’s congested Jama Masjid area have something to do with the deep sense of claustrophobia that much of Gogi Saroj Pal’s artistic output conveys? Where precisely does ‘the frenzy of creativity’ that gripped Calcutta from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s fit into Manu Parekh’s oeuvre?

The answers to these questions are not quite as simple and unidirectional as they may seem, but veteran television producer and filmmaker K. Bikram Singh’s 13-part series, A Painter’s Portrait, formulates them with striking clarity and airs them with a remarkable lightness of touch.