A card painting by Sunil Sil

The craft of the designer is both open-ended and flexible. The point is best appreciated when one learns to see the most acclaimed paintings, ultimately as fine specimens of design — as abstractions of the visible reality. Interestingly, the art movement initiated by Piet Mondrian, a 20th-century protagonist of pure form, brought in its train a whole new world of design.

Closer home, Sunil Sil has been busy designing new-look greeting cards that involve sensitive images based on one or more lines taken from Bengali and other poems. The poets range from Shakti Chattopadhyay to Joy Goswami to William Shakespeare.

In some instances, the cards are built on photographs of delectable paintings rendered by Sil himself as well as such notables among painters as Jogen Chowdhury, Jayshree Chakrabarty, Aditya Basak and Shuvaprasanna. In others, the visuals used on cards are camera-constructed photographs like the decorative poster created from Pabitra Das’s 20x30 work Shadows (a hand-rickshaw puller on the city street) derived from a Shakespearean text.

Introducing new concepts, Arts & Ideas (at Swabhumi, Shop No. 213) designs casual wear, books, personalised letter-heads, brands and identities and provides professional assistance to people and organisations who want to make good design a part of people’s everyday life. The current show, one hopes, will go a long way in breaking down the conventional barrier between high technology and futuristic artistry.

Thai art students at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, are showing a wide cross-section of their work under the title Between, signifying the cultural bridge they have helped build between India and Thailand.

Why similar collective efforts have not been made by other groups of oriental visitors — who are known to have sojourned in this abode of international creativity, if only to underscore a living cultural association that has gained strength and significance with the visits of newer generations of aspiring artists — is a question of some importance which only the Korean students have addressed themselves to, through sporadic exhibitions in the past.

The immediate context of the current, highly impressive exposition at the galleries of the Academy of Fine Arts is a recently-held workshop at Silpakorn University where a group of Kala Bhavan teachers conducted the event involving Thai-Indian artists. A reciprocity of sorts is in the offing in the shape of a workshop slated for October-November this year.

The ongoing exhibition involves Kala Bhavan’s Thai students Thirawut Bunyasakseri, Verapat Sitipol, Krishna Chavanakunakorn, Suwisa Thampratheep, Saowalak Dajmanon (tapestry designer) and Prasit Emthim (sculptor) and others. Each of them speaks in his personalised idiom and shows remarkable neatness of execution.