MASTER STROKES

Samir Mondal has endowed watercolours with the status of oils by developing textures and structural features, but never losing their originality and elegance, says Saswati Chaudhuri

- Saswati Chaudhuri

Samir Mondal has a name that is hard S to forget, and the same could be said for his glorious artwork. It is not easy to forget the beauty of it once you have cast your gaze upon it. Hailed as the watercolour man of India, 70-year-old Mondal is an artist evolved by nature.

Much before his paintings for the 2007 Bollywood blockbuster, Taare Zameen Par, became the talk of the town, the illustrious painter started his artistic odyssey from Balti, a small Bengali village in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal."It was such a small village that there was no trace of town-like features and no facilities. In fact, there was nothing," recalls the Mumbai-based artist. "But it was rich in terms of nature's bounty. It was an undisturbed rural location with a small river, ponds, boats, trees and plants, a village temple, rituals and local festivals, customs and traditions, and simple people living friendly with each other. It was like growing up with nature freely without any restriction. No light, no noise like cities, it was so untouched by modernity that there was no paper," he says. Can you imagine that he used to write on palm leaves in his childhood? "It sounds like I was born a thousand years ago," says the artist credited with a continual revival of watercolours. He describes the Sonai river in a very artistic manner, reflecting his deep observation from early childhood memories. "Sonai with its crystal clear water without any undercurrent was the lifeline of that small village.