easelstories

  Kolkata-based artist Malay Shah’s paintings skilfully combine the energies of a room known to us all, whether within structure or through acquaintances, in an ideal setup or discrete corners of homes. Shah’s figurative furniture passages with exemplified nature of its owners, the people we know, not directly, but through the meanings hidden in their choices. Malay Shah, The Room, 2007, 24*22 Inches, Acrylic  As artist Donald Judd, a minimalist pattern art creator once said, “Somewhere, a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.” Within the realms of contemporary art and commentaries, the context of paintings and ways of expression have changed strikingly and to a point where art styles have taken a circular route to be back in vogue, the idea of the art’s context is still relevant. Although, there have been shifts in terms of escalation of the value of, for example, maximalism in art. This norm also moves to mak...

  Malta Doors, 2017, Print on Archival Paper, 30.5*40.6cm The Malta Doors Series, a curated collection of photographs by Tarunima Sen was created at the beginning of her fondness for travel where her photography and art series became a reflection of personal ideas and learning, new initiatives, and passion for art. The street photography series rendered an experience of craft, art classes, and exploration of people’s houses, studios, and tourist spots. Tarunima Sen toured the expanse of Malta and Prague with a friend, the owner of an art agency as well as a deep collector of art, and they found themselves in the company of artists who invited them to their studio spaces, at fine art courses as observers and mysterious places that spoke of the locales of Malta, its beauty and benevolent spirit. As the spot turned into a retreat for photographic art, her adoration for doors became an entire succession of graphics and graceful endeavour.  The colourful doors of Malta are central ...

  The advent of Pop Art came about in areas of Europe in the 1950s. This classification was a nascent theme by and for several emerging artists, much like how art movements start, with a sense of renewal and innovative art styles. Pop Art culture essentially includes the concept and contrast of pop culture contained in other storytelling mediums, hints at cinematic and literary excellence, but more so, commercially viable alternates, and embraces new modern perspectives of talking about the world and beyond. Among the youth of the time, the post-World War II generation, the art style burst like a rebellious yet graceful alternative notion responding to the visual medium of art and expression. As a way of inventing self-belief after the gruesome times that they had seen, artists needed a store of energy, a way of feeling like themselves again, breathing in their own bodies, and moving with the wind of their own making. Pop Arts made eminent the idea of the celebration of life, and m...

  Darkness, they say, is a boon. Artists create the concept of Avant-Garde, grandeur, and layered perceptions in darkness as much as light, a play of colours exchanging scenes between sets. The dark inspires creators to surge within, into a search for the deepest avenues of the self. Secrets, pretentious norms, quirks, nightmares, and most certainly, embellished certainties find themselves dipped in paint, unnerved in brush strokes, and instituted in figures of the artist’s making. It is with this predicament we explore the varying facets of the dark, and specific to that, horror in art. Throughout history, motifs of evil and the wretched have been used to make commentaries on underlying issues in culture, governments, society, and even religion. In 1781, the profound Henri Fuseli painted, ‘The Nightmare’ inspired by a demonic phase in his town where he made into the subjects of his paintings, people who reported sinister events produced in their sleep, and even when they claimed t...

Abstract art uses dots, lines, shapes, forms, colours to attain a configuration, concept or culmination of feelings. Abstract art came into picture at the crossover to the twentieth century. It is an art style that breaks away from drawing art as it is embodied in real life figures and known skeletal movement. “Abstract is a dance of colours, dots into lines and linear moves into stunning moods, subjective and personal,” states A. Viswam, a veteran artist and master abstract painter long associated with Easel Stories Art Gallery.  A.Viswam, The Candy Shop, 2022, 36*72 Inches, Oil on Canvas  One could even undertake the idea of abstract as a journey into an unacquainted, yet trustworthy territory. Abstract art becomes more about the process than the destined point as days flow in the art world. It involves the arrangements of Surrealism (a blurred expression of the conscious mind, created in art post the second world war and the hazy depictions of its ramifications,) ...

Art Nouveau’ was and remains the ornamental style of art that flourished between 1890 and 1910 throughout  Europe  and the Western World. Art Nouveau is characterised by its use of a long, graceful, animate line and was employed in  architecture  forms,  interior design ,  jewellery ,  glass  making,  posters , and illustrations. It was a deliberate creation of a new style of art. The term Art Nouveau was coined in Belgium, Spain and Paris.  The unique ornamental value of Art Nouveau was its surging and irregular lines, taking the form of flowers and buds, vine fronds, wings of insects, and delicate, natural objects of profound beauty. In the  graphic arts , the line subordinated all other pictorial elements. Form, texture, the white space, hues of gorgeous distinction were found in latter halves in its making.  Architecture and the three-dimensional form became overwhelmingly rhythmic as a work of art, stunning fusions of orna...