EVERYONE walks into the fashionable restro-bar Ta Blu with their eyes glued to the walls. Before they wind their way to a table, they do the rounds of the wall, stopping to take a closer look at the paintings. Every week they see a new set up on the walls and every week a new artist takes a bow in this rooftop restaurant.Far from the bylanes in the old city where tourists are urged to peer through a magnifying glass and look at the fineness of Rajasthani miniature paintings, a whole range of contemporary artists have found a new lease of life in the environs of art galleries. The opening of new galleries in the pink city has suddenly recharged the otherwise ‘decadent art scene’ and artists are entering a whole new world. ‘‘Earlier artists like me would carefully wrap all our works and travel all the way to Delhi or Mumbai to exhibit our paintings. And even our buyers, many from Jaipur, would go all the way to these cities to pick up stuff. Now we do it all here,’’ says Vinay Sharma. Trying to break through ‘‘traditional mindsets’’ and going beyond the evergreen miniature copies and gemstone paintings, a whole new generation of gallery owners and artists are creating ripples in the art market. ‘‘I have never had so many people seeing and appreciating my art ever before,’’ says Sudhir Mishra. Besides the lush venue of the government run Jawahar Kala Kendra and the Juneja Art Gallery, which was the first to set-up shop in Jaipur, a number of new venues have opened up. ‘‘There really was a vacuum,’’ admits Timmie Kumar, owner of the gallery at Ta Blu. ‘‘My eventual dream is to open a big, proper gallery but I am not sure Jaipur is ready for it. Hence this small beginning.’’ Like Kumar, Mukesh Gupta is also ‘‘making art more accessible’’. Unlike other gallery owners, he prefers to call his establishment an alternate market for art lovers. While tourists flock to buy gemstone paintings in the old city, at Gupta’s Art and Frames, the buzz is about young artists. ‘‘I have applied economies of scale to the whole process. I encourage artists to sell me paintings in bulk. It lowers the cost for me and further for the buyer,’’ says Gupta. The bottomline is that these galleries are slowly reviving the art market in the city. Just like the tourist boom ensured that miniatures and gemstone paintings didn’t fade out of the markets, galleries are working overtime to ‘‘bring back the creativity that Rajasthan was always known for’’ — the blend of tradition and modernity that makes buyers come back for more.
