A painting by Balaka Bhattacharjee and (below) a work by G.S.M. Moorthy

Children of well-known artists find it difficult to develop in the shadow of their eminent parent. They may feel obliged to follow in her or his footsteps and such diffidence may often kill their creativity.

Balaka Bhattacharjee has at least cut herself free from her father’s artistic legacy and has tried to strike out on her own at Sanskriti gallery’s exhibition. Her exhibition begins with a video of views of Calcutta streets such as Chowringhee and Park Street.

Her focus is on the lights of passing cars and street lights and the abstract neon sign-like patterns they create. In between are shots of a little girl lying naked on the street.

The background score is an ominous hum. This relates to her canvases hung from the ceiling. In her paintings she portrays herself as Gaia lying sprawled across the countryside with the city in a stratum above. The body of the naked girl recurs in her paintings. Gaia flies across the urbanscape. A street dog lies on the pavement. Her inclusion of frescoes from Egypt may strike the viewer as jarring.

Scribble is an admirable organisation that brings together artists from all over India, mainly from Maharashtra and south India. It held a group show at the G.C. Laha centenary fine arts gallery on Chittaranjan Avenue recently. But however admirable the effort, there was little to admire in the paintings.

The number of participants was phenomenal and most of them were trained in well-known institutions. But that does not seem to have made much of an impression on them. They were mostly imitative or were throwbacks to styles popular decades ago. There was one stained glass entry. A young artist from Russia participated.

There were a few exceptions. G.S.M. Moorthy’s digital graphics on paper were imaginative and made good use of high technology. The second was Praveen Hatwar’s hybrid billie goats with their liquid eyes. Santosh Andrade’s village with tiled roofs and painted walls were reminiscent of Sudhir Patwardhan without the menace. They were charming, in fact.

Primitive queens and queens with broad noses and not quite bee-stung mouths are the main protagonists of Rabin Mandal’s paintings. They appear over and over again in the works of the artist who has turned 80. They do so once again in his current exhibition at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR. These figures are painted green and yellow and contoured with black lines and look persistently gloomy. They have been painted in a brutal fashion to emphasise nature red in tooth and claw. Mandal paints rhinoceros-like beasts with fierce-looking expressions and a set of sharp teeth.

There are workers in a factory and a painting of a child that could have been painted by a child itself — a splash of yellow and smudged paint. Some of the paintings date to his early youth, the 1950s, when he stippled the surface of paper. There is also a sensitive self-portrait of the artist.