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Bringing holi to life on the canvas

Just like the skin soaks in the pinks and magentas on Holi, Khar-based artist Smeetha Bhoumik absorbs impressions of Holi celebrations as she paints her canvas, ‘Spring Tide’, her dedication to the effervescent spirit of Holi.

Just when spring sets in, comes a day best expressed through fun and frolic and splashes of colour and water, which Bhoumik translates in this painting for the occasion. Perhaps for a colourist-painter, colours hold a special connotation. A sensitive painter, her sense of myriad hues speaks volumes of her talent, “Pink means happy thinking, feeling good and red means vibrancy, both colours of Holi. On my canvas too, they mean the same.”

An action painter, planning and ideating beforehand does not go down well with her. “My painting is just the way people splash colours, while playing Holi. I start, and then the colours takes shape and form on canvas,” she explains her modus operandi with a smile.

“Earlier, real flowers such as the Palash were used to extract colour. Now, over the years, artificial colours have replaced this, which is sad, as it ruins the entire purpose of Holi,” she rues. The scientific reason behind the festival of colours remains the medicinal significance, which the flower extracted colours carry, that of healing diseases caused due to the change in seasons.

Feels Bhoumik, “A lot has also changed for those living in cities such as Mumbai. In fact, Holi is a festival that brings people and communities together. Today, we don’t even know, who our neighbours are, and the community feeling is hardly there. Instead, it’s all about having fun at other people’s expense and spoiling their clothes.”

Combining her sentiments with painting she explains, “Just like Holi is several layers of colours, so is my painting. I am starting with pink, and by the end, the canvas will be a totally different colour.” Creating flowers in pink, red and blue, she imagines the colourful swirls of foogdis that girls play with gay abandon on Holi, and thus the additional swirls of reds, blues, purples and pinks reflect on the canvas too.

Brought up in the IIT Powai campus, where her father was a professor, she remembers, “We would form a large group on the day of Holi, and go from one home to the another collecting more people. There were samosas, jalebis and bhang on the menu. After those years at IIT, I have never played Holi. Maybe because life in this city has become so busy, it leaves no space for light and colour.”

And yet, with the colourful message of the perennial win of good over evil as the Holika is set on fire, Bhoumik gives the finishing flourish of colours to the painting, and writes, ‘Laal, gulabi, uspe bahado neela…, dhul jaaye tan man, hokar rang rangeela’.

jigna.padhiar@timesgroup.com