Dharshana Bajaj

The Internet is a magical phenomenon. It takes you to places you couldn’t possibly go to in one lifetime, and to people you would never meet otherwise in the normal course of your days. Like me, sitting in Chennai, and connecting with one of the greatest artists living, across the globe, in Hollywood.   I had always considered myself an artist. Until I saw Laurie Lipton’s work, and realised just how presumptuous I had been, and just how much more I needed to learn. I had come upon her work on an online gallery, quite by chance. And since then, every encounter with her works, online of course, has left me amazed, awestruck even, with her astounding mastery of her craft. Laurie’s work is grand, momentous, and monumental. Like the grand old masters long gone. Like them, her themes are of her times, reflecting the ethos and culture around. With one significant difference. She uses no colour.  If you, like me, considered drawing to be just a preliminary step to pain

Like everything else around us, a painting can have a soul, a spirit, too. Or so I like to believe. Sometimes a painting gets done in one go. Just like that, its finished, and ready to find a new home. Sometimes it takes months, years even, and repeated sittings and explorations before it finally seems ready to move on. For instance, this one landscape of mine refused to be happy with whatever treatment I gave it. At several stages, it looked for all practical purposes to be 'finished'. Yet, something just didn't feel right about it...making me take paint to it again, and again. When the canvas is small, and it doesn't seem to work out, I may leave it in a corner of my studio space until such time as I'm ready to rework on it. Probably happily painting over it. But this particular landscape was done on a larger canvas, at 36" x 48". I loved the idea of the big tree dominating the scene, underlining how much grander nature truly is whether we ac

How does man relate with nature? As a user, and abuser? A Marauder? Recklessly, irresponsibly consuming and wasting? Selfishly possessing and imposing, digging and destroying? Covering inch by inch of this beautiful world with glorified man-made plastics?  We take and we take and we take. Our entire lives, cultures, education systems, societal setups are all centred on earning more to have more. To take. To be more separate from the rest, to be better materially, with the bigger car, the better house, the fancier holiday. What would it take to change this perspective to one where not our distinctness but our oneness, with each other and with the world around us, is celebrated? To not only know but to truly believe that 'I am a part of all that I see'? To look at a tree, a flower, a leaf, a mountain, and even a pebble and feel that 'I am that'? One way I can think of, for a start, is to include in our lifestyles, in our daily lives, some time in nature. In sol