After the perimeter walls of Iswarchandra Nivas in Ultadanga got illustrated recently with Jamini Roy works, here are a couple of walls in Salt Lake that have let the paintbrush give them an aesthetic identity.
A 10ftx20ft wall in BC Block has got illustrated in keeping with the character of the outfit running inside. Abstract figures ruminate over or chat away over outlines of three steaming cups. No prizes for guessing that the place is a cafe.
Owner Debojit Paul gave the brief of people bonding over a cuppa to doodle artist Joyeeta Basu. It took her and her team a day to bring the faceless white wall to life.
It is an opportune time for Calcutta 64, the cafe named after the area’s postal index number code, to attract eyeballs of passersby as the place is set for an expansion. “We are adding 56 covers to the 14 inside,” Paul said.
But he is not content with painting just his own wall. “There are quite a few houses along the pavement that have blank white walls. If the house-owners allow, I can work to turn the stretch into a doodle street,” he offers.
“It is a great concept. But many of the houses on the road are co-ooperatives and not even our members. Neither do we have the funds to sponsor such an exercise,” said secretary of the block residents’ body Sudipto Chowdhury.
Youths trained with the CG Block-based NGO Prayasam chose a wall of their office to translate the message “Be the change you want to see”. Divided into three groups, they chose different segments of the wall to do up the message according to the design they had devised. The youths from Dakshindari, Mahisbathan, Sukantanagar and other surrounding areas were joined by Prayasam interns from Kenya and Spain who wielded the paint brush all morning and then posed for pictures with the segment they had beautified.
