Artists with their creations at Ranchi Club on Saturday. Picture by Prashant Mitra

Ranchi, Sept. 15: Free thoughts on a canvas or imagination restricted to a particular theme?

That was the debate on the minds of 22 artists who took part in a four-day art camp — an attempt by the state government to add glamour to the Suhana Safar film festival — which wound up at the capital’s Ranchi Club Complex today.

The artists, who were asked to work on the theme “100 years of Indian cinema” during the camp, however, had their work cut out as daily spells of rain made going difficult for them. The open-air camp was arranged in one of the lawns of the club and the artists had to duck for cover with their works every time the sky opened up.

But judging by the work the artists managed to put together, the audience was more than convinced that they had done justice to the topic.

Some of the highlights of the camp were the works presented by senior pros like Haren Thakur, Dinesh Singh and Vinod Ranjan, all of who have their signature styles and added a little twist here and there on the canvas.

While Thakur worked on a mixed media collage and used a few pictures of cine idols on his canvas, his colleague Tarak Shankar choose a different genre altogether and painted a shooting zone.

Praven Karmakar’s canvas showed a poor couple looking eagerly at a film poster, while Rajeev Pathak depicted a man sitting and enjoying a film in a theatre. Debjyoti Sarkar’s take on Indian cinema was that of a bullock cart made famous by Hindi films. Ujjwal Ghosh on the other hand depicted a shootout scene with the help of a spray gun.

Apart from them, the others who took part in the art camp included Keka Bose, who used celluloid rolls in her work, Manoj Sinha, Subrata Roy Choudhury, Himadri Ramani, Umesh Mehta, Uttam Mallick and Shilpi Ramani.

While ordinary visitors generally appreciated their work, there weresome who had expected something more.

�When I came to see paintings on cinema, I expected some paintings ofor based on the great scenes of our great movies would be here, likethe scene (of Pather Panchali) where Apu and Durga are seen runningthrough the Kash-filled fields to see a train�, commented AnuradhaBiswas who had �just dropped in to see the paintings.

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