A painting by Amitabha Banerjee

Amitabha Banerjee, a leading printmaker, is holding an exhibition at Akar Prakar — justifiably titled Imprints off a Sensitive Soul — in which his skill at creating intaglio and dry point is quite evident.

Each line is clearly etched and every shade of blue and green was applied with such forethought that together a fine balance between light and shadows has been attained producing a mood that can only be described as poetic.

His paintings and drawings are an extension of his prints and their strength lies in their lineation. Even the colours are practically the same although in his watercolours he uses muddy shades.

A well-produced book documenting Banerjee’s works (text by Manasij Majumdar) was released at the opening of this exhibition.

A work by Partha Pratim Deb

Partha Pratim Deb is a rare artist who can create an entire exhibition of drawings by merely playing around with lines that are sometimes whimsical, sometimes humorous, sometimes grave, sometimes thoughtful, always fluid and playful.

These drawings on display at Gallery K2 have a cadence expressive of a certain mood that one associates with a humoresque, those short and fanciful musical pieces. These are the products of a fertile and fecund imagination, and one can almost visualise Deb wielding either a brush or a pen with the skill of a virtuoso, conjuring up clowns, men with quizzical expressions, despairing women, a human frog, a bitch with human udders, and also non-figurative compositions where his conceptual powers come to the fore. Coils of rope, a fine mesh of lines, grids, and stippled surfaces create fields of grey of varying texture.

In this world of grey, the only note of colour is provided by the installation in the middle of the room created with iridescent khullars, bottles of the same bright hues, and a bright yellow stove and kettle perched on a table.

This is a typical Partha Pratim Deb touch.

A Tibetan monk demonstrates the Sand Mandala. Picture by Amit Datta

Even as the lamas hit the protest path against Chinese aggression in Tibet, an exhibition of rare Tibetan art trundled into town this week with a bunch of monks in tow.

The six-day Festival of Sacred Art and Culture from the Land of Snow, organised by Indian Museum and Tibet House of Delhi, laid out a spread of thangka and a demonstration of the Sand Mandala at the museum’s Asutosh Birth Centenary Hall from March 25.

Sanskrit and Tibetan coexist in the set of 31 thangkas on display. They represent Avadana Kalpalata, the poetic outpourings of Ksemendra written in Kashmir of 1052. The collection of Avadana stories became a source of inspiration for writers and painters of wall murals.

To make the Avadana widely available, woodcut blocks of the text were made and printed in early 18th Century at the press of Narthang monastery. The set of 31 Narthang woodcuts spread far and wide in the lama world.

“The thangkas here are over 200 years old. Thangka artists today are hard to find; there are some in Dharmashala and as refugees in south Karnataka and Missouri. But the technique is poor; artists today have very little time and find it more lucrative to churn out thangkas quickly instead of devoting entire lives to perfect a piece. Several artists even teach thangka painting in urban centres,” said Lama Doboom Tulku, the director of Tibet House.

The Sand Mandala painting, which a team of about six monks demonstrates at the venue using crushed and coloured marble, also represents perfection. Here the theme is the “divine mansion”.

Mandala painting is a part of meditation ritual. Unlike the rangoli, it is not a floor decoration. Mandala is always done on a raised platform; it can be painted, made in 3D or with coloured sand. At the musuem, specially trained monks jerk the coloured powder on a flat horizontal surface through funnels, until the “divine mansion” is complete.

The display apart, the festival is also showcasing vocal and instrumental music, and folk dances. The show wraps up on Sunday with the screening of Kundun, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the life of the Dalai Lama.