Artists from all over the country participate at a five-day national art camp at the Raj Bhavan in Bhubaneswar. Pictures by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, July 9: Colours are doing the talking at an ongoing artists’ camp at the Raj Bhavan in the capital as seasoned hands are creating images of their minds on canvases.

The five-day national art camp is leading to some masterpieces of art in the making. Veteran artist Dinanath Pathy is busy giving shape to his imagination on the canvas by using golden metal acrylic colours and rice paper. His painting of a tiger on the rice paper is full of smaller details of other animals and at corners of the canvas the viewer will be stunned with fascinating images of the sketchbook of chitrakars or artists of Odia villages.

At the masthead of the painting is an announcement of the train route to reach Locarno and Zurich. Pathy’s work is a collage of these varied images.

“I recently visited Switzerland and the train route that I have included in my work is a memory of my trip. But in the context of the painting, it just indicates that if you have a definite plan to reach a destination be it Locarno or Zurich, you can surely reach it. The same is with the protection of tigers. If we have a definite plan we can surely save tigers. Similarly, since no one bothers about the conserving the sketch books of ancient Odia artists, we have lost most of them,” said Pathy.

Artists can be seen lost in their works at the different halls of the Raj Bhavan. Senior artist D.N. Rao is giving final touches to his artwork that is inspired from Saura tribal art.

Rao has drawn an owl that is holding a snake in its claws. There are many symbolic patterns from the tribal art system that have been highlighted by Rao in his painting.

Well-known painter Jagannath Panda is not working on the canvas. He has rather chosen watercolour on paper. Taking visual instances from the surroundings of the Raj Bhavan, Panda has incorporated various elements such as fountains and lamp posts in his painting, the central theme of which is a speaking tree. The faces of different animals are seen forming at the branches of the tree. Panda has interestingly experimented in his work using unconventional elements such as speech balloons and fabric.

“This is an extension of my earlier works. I will be using text in my work that will be placed in the speech balloons. But it will not be the animals you see on the tree that will be talking. It would be an invisible being in the tree that will talk. The fabric patches I will be using have been seen in many of my earlier works,” said Panda.

There are numerous striking paintings and creations at the camp. One of the most remarkable works is by Maharashtra-based artist Bharati Kapadia. She has cut out a portion of the canvas into the figure of a woman. The faceless cut out of the woman can be seen leaning on the wooden canvas frames, in a perfect sitting posture. She has also created a web of threads for support that Kapadia has created by stitching herself.

Diana Mohapatra’s depiction of different aspects of a woman, Ramakant Samantray’s work that highlights the Odia letters as drawings and images, Veejayant’s three-layered painting ‘Void’ are some impressive works in progress at the camp.

“The works of the art camp will be preserved at the Raj Bhavan and most likely at a gallery that is to come up soon in the premises here. We are glad that the 28 eminent artistes here from Odisha, New Delhi, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh have given their best and are creating some extraordinary works,” said vice-president of Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi Sarat Kumar Rath, the co-ordinator of the event. The camp is on until July 11.