Puran Chandra: A bureaucrat romancing with the brush

Some of the selected romantic paintings and poetic sculpures from the treasure of Anustup world of art of  Mr Puran Chandra, a famous Oriya poet were exhibited  at JKK which  was big surprises for many. Mr Jai Ram Ramesh the union minister came to inaugurate the show. After knowing that the canvases were replete with modern art, dignity along with the reflections of the contemporary art colored beautifully by a bureaucrat of the government of Rajasthan, the curiosity level of the viewers was hightened.  

Freely painted and boldly colored various women bodies and faces having a central characteristic of romanticism has recognizable content like most informal compostions, colors like pink, soft blue, yellow and intuitively free brush work .The artist has tried his best to give a full rendering of variety of facial contours of women and at the same time he also organized more accurately the pattern of the brush on the picture surface.

He deeply studied his techniques to unify the effects of emotions on different canvases. According to Mr Puran Chand, “sometimes I have been a poet of spirit. However I have been mostly the poet of body. The conflict between the spirit and the body is the central theme of  my painting and poetry ….  art for me has been a perpetual beginning without any sure and certain end.”

Romanticism is basically a matter of outlook so we cannot talk in terms of a set of formal stylistic characristics. Once the poet and painter William Blake strongly advocated for freedom of an artist to express what does he want to create on the canvas. Blake’s declaration that “talent thinks and genius sees”  drew a rational deduction and insights of creative genius. He defended  the need of individual to follow his own inner conviction rather than obey the regulations of others. His radical view of individual freedom accorded with upsurge in liberal opinions that emerged at a time of French Revolution.

Purno’s obsession with women figure has been influenced by the varied imagination of Urvashi which still come haunting him on canvases and in sculptures. Urvashi is one name but imagined with different faces by many of our intellectuals and artists of India. It is nature the most beautiful thing of the universe but if you look at the textures and colors of his canvases some are historical facts of the matter. The cultural facts on the ground  tell a very different story.

Faces of most of the women are worried with vacant look and their lips are  kilometers away  from smiles. They are waiting for some thing to happen in their lives  silently. All these saddened faces  are the documents of  intensified emotional  and actual experiences. There is a sense of barreneness, ruin, mist and his defeated  dreams. His romanticism greatly inhanced by the circumstances he rose, stood and is yet  searching for convictions.