Rural-urban divide reflect in Uma Bardhan paintings

Inspired by her formative years in Kolkata and time spent travelling Bengal's interiors, artist Uma Bardhan has dedicated her latest series of paintings on rural and urban life in and around the City of Joy.
In her art exhibition showcasing 22 paintings at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bardhan portrays the predominance of artificial environment prevalent in our city life as a contrast to the pristine beauty of nature in rural Bengal.
This series is hugely inspired by her formative years in Kolkata and the time she spent travelling to the interior villages and tribal areas of Bengal -- a motif which keeps recurring in her works.

The paintings displayed in the exhibition titled -- Urban & Rural Life -- bring many of those subjects to life. Her ruralscapes communicate homogeneity, love towards nature and rural plenty.
On the other hand, the rickshaw-puller in the urbanscapes series is a symbolic representation that the people in the city belong to different castes, religion and cultures and do not enjoy the same social status.
"I have travelled extensively as a student of art and also with my group of co-artists. The village scenes -- ponds, trees, birds, women, social customs are so different from city life as we see it in Kolkata on a daily basis," Bardhan said.

Also, in urbanscapes, her paintings depict the mobility and adaptability of ever changing city life and at the same time her paintings in ruralscape series.

The painting 'village pond', for example, upholds the beauty of a water lily which stands tall above the muddy water, not dirtied by the mud from where it grows.
Born in 1945, Bardhan specialises in figurative paintings and landscapes which are done to perfection in water colour on silk, oil on canvas and water mixable oil on canvas.
She is one of those rare artists who uses medium the "water colour on silk" with finesse. This is a painstaking process where a special silk cloth is mounted on board before it can be used for painting.