Dec 20, 1999

Jayashree Chakravarty, 43
Painter/Installation Artist

FREE SPIRIT

Clad in track pants, working out with weights, Chakravarty looks like an unlikely artist. Except the weights keep Chakravarty's arms from getting tired during those long hours that she paints.

This Santiniketan graduate's 30-ft wide, 12-ft high canvases often require her to stand on a ladder for hours applying oils or water colours in large, bold strokes. "I love large canvases," says Chakravarty. "They make me feel so free." Best known for her works on multi-layered handmade or rice paper, she crowds a sheet with doodles, squiggles and colours. Then she sticks another sheet on and repeats the process. The result, as one critic commented, is a "semi-abstract, mirage-like illusion that gives ... a sense of distance, and therefore, time". Or she might twist coloured, painted paper and suspend it from the ceiling and call it a "a gorge of art". It flows.

Labonita Ghosh

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