Echoes of Kashmir in UT artist's paintings

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 9

Many enjoy the values and views of nature, but extraordinary are the ones, who exalt it by recreating them through recollection with the help of aesthetic, but transcendental sense of art and beauty.

The recreations assumes a special dimension if they are recollected from about decade-long one’s association with natural ambience of Kashmir.

One such recreation of nature’s own automated life and its cycle is vide the medium of painting, especially to reinforce the view that benevolent ‘mother earth’ is there for real, only if one cares to be sensitive and has a panoptic and spiritual view of the world.

The spiritually replenishing scope of nature was in ample display at an exhibition of paintings by Jyoti Nagpal, a city resident, in the India International Centre (IIC) here, which was inaugurated by former Union Minister Dr Karan Singh.

Nagpal, who taught French for 20 years in Chandigarh, Kashmir and Delhi, quit to take up painting as a full time activity.

She displayed a series of virtuoso paintings, which are in the traditions of oil painting under the rubric “The good earth”.

Nagpal’s inspiration to recreate the refreshing and myriad forms of nature came to her during the period of deafening silence and limpness of human life in the Covid-inspired lockdown.

The recreations are from Nagpal’s recollection of her memories of a decade long association with pristine beauty of Kashmir (1976-87) when there was peace in the Valley.

This was the time when flora and fauna bloomed and the environment got invigorated due to less pollution. Animals ventured out against marauding humans, forced to remain indoors. Nature was dressed up in all nines, in all her luminosity and splendour in the absence of pollution with human beings bound in their homes.

The lockdown was also a reminder that nature has its own mystic way to punish capricious humans to restore order and equilibrium in the environment.

Although all paintings, which are immaculately framed, enthralled visitors, the ones depicting an edge of a forest and peacocks with their full plumage looked as natural as they could get. The scenic views have echoes of Kashmir.

“This collection of paintings is an attempt to portray the beauty of nature as I observe and perceive it,” said Nagpal.

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