Artist in seclusion: My studio is like a temple for me, says Paresh Maity

These are dark times but a beautiful new light will shine on the universe, Maity tells Pavan Lall

It’s a dusky afternoon in New Delhi in the middle of the week and I am having coffee with artist Paresh Maity over, what else, a video call. The less than optimal internet connection eventually settles down and I can see Maity.
 
He’s known to normally sport a beret but is wearing a Nepali hat today, paired with a striped black-and-white t-shirt that looks like a Jean Paul Gaultier design. In the background, I spot vintage Kolkata Colonial-era furniture in Burma teak, and large mirrors. Maity is at his Greater Kailash home, sipping on his milk-less cup of ginger tea with saffron and spices. It’s coffee for me.

 
Travels have been restricted to jaunts to Mumbai, Rajasthan and family visits to Kolkata. Aside from that, the normally peripatetic painter says he’s mostly been homebound, as have most others.
 

The video gets clearer, and the soft-spoken Maity tells me that while he has been in Delhi most of last year and this, his mind is always on the move.
 
He’s not complaining. “After all, where an artist is is important. But more important is where his thoughts are,” says the 56-year-old globe-trotting Maity, almost thankful that he doesn’t have to now accumulate air miles hopping to Paris, London, Venice, and other such art hotspots.

 
Regular meals, no eating out, and above all, limited disturbance mean that he’s been able to finish the works he had started years, maybe even decades, ago.
 
Maity, who was one of six siblings and grew up in small-town Tamluk in West Bengal, studied art at the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata, and later at the College of Art, Delhi. His struggles are the stuff of lore: Travelling for hours by bus daily to go to school; washing the same pair of trousers to wear the next day; subsisting on puffed rice, and so on.

 
His ascent in the world of art, by his own admission, wouldn’t have been possible without a string of mentors: Lady Ranu Mookerjee, a patron of the arts; Rathin Moitra, his art teacher; C R Irani, editor-in-chief of the Statesman; the Parsi sisters Banu and Veera Gazdar whose home in Kolkata he stayed in; Sunny and Shobha Bhatia of Gallerie Ganesha; and Katayun “Katie” Saklat, artist and classmate of Bikash Bhattacharya, who helped promote his work.
 
So has the pandemic helped him become more organised, working a nine-to-five routine, going to his studio in New Delhi like clockwork? Maity says that he was always very disciplined and that when he paints or draws, he most­ly works alone. “My studio is almost like my temple for me. Nobody is in attendance there when I’m working.”

 
The world is dark right now. India especially so, with its tally of Covid-19 statistics. How does that impact an artist looking for new worlds in large rooms full of bright paint, empty canvases and windows designed to allow natural light in? Maity says it brings with it a share of doom and gloom that is impossible to exorcise.
 
But all one can do is look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Hope and optimism is what he is infusing into his work. While his paintings are always colourful and joyous, now more than ever he is creating palettes with brighter shades and luminosity and images that are designed to instantly uplift. The dimensions are larger than before — think 10- or 15-feet canvases, he says. The themes are vibrant landscapes and human figures in harmony.

 
“Whatever I was trying to do for so many years has become more simplified. More minimalistic,” he says. “I always wanted positive energy. The object is to bring in more joy manifested through art, and that is what I have strived to achieve for the last four decades.”
 
Art to him, says Maity, “is a system of aesthetics, which is timeless and uplifts humankind to greater heights”.
 
His earlier works haven’t been bereft of dark themes, I mention, to which his response is a slow spreading smile. “When you paint night-time scenes, they tend to be dark, and of course one also moves on.”

 
He shares that soon he will be starting work on a pair of circular paintings, something he started exploring a few years ago and which has got popular with collectors.
 
Maity today may be the critically acclaimed, Porsche-driving poster-boy of modern Indian art but he’s also seen hard times. Three decades ago, he’d be astride a bicycle, canvases under his arm, taking his work to show around in Delhi. I ask him about this and he nods, adding that he’s worked on a very large outdoor installation of bicycles. “I love bicycles,” he says.
 
He has come a long way from those bicycle days. From top law firms to museums, from hotel lobbies to the homes of the rich and the famous and even the Rashtrapati Bhavan, his works abound. He has been conferred the Padma Shri, the Cartier Award, and scores of other state level and national awards. His works have been exhibited in galleries from Singapore to Switzerland and America to Australia.

 
Does he ever feel the desire to put the easel aside and take a break? “Not working is unimaginable, but yes I am changing in that I would once make very many smaller pieces, and that’s getting rarer,” he says. “You need a certain amount of space to be able to fully stretch the boundaries of what you’re trying to say.”
 
As someone who loves the light, he says he hardly paints after sunset. “I’m a day person and once dusk sets in, I stop painting.”
 
This grim period has led many to turn to religion. Maity says he was and continues to be very spiritual. Solitude, nature, and reflections are ultimately where man finds his optimum bala­nce, he believes. To that extent, he needs nothing more than the glimpse of a sunbeam, the shape of a leaf or raindrops glistening in the streetlight to refuel his spirit and recharge his canvases.

 
“All art, after all, is but an imitation of nature,” he says, quoting Aristotle, and goes on to add that “there will be new and beautiful light that will come to the universe and while it may seem like an examination of patience, it will happen”.