How Yashika Sugandh’s paintings integrate humanity and nature through the art of miniatures

Her paintings have a narrative imagery about them, as they present themselves as “love letters to birds and animals”. On her canvas, roots like ropes stretch to carry words, letters in Devanagari, where monkeys hang, birds glide, geckos slither and leopards perch. “I’m an observer and nature is my biggest inspiration. I observe all little-big things that happen in and around my surroundings and subconsciously or consciously they enter my art. Everyone is free, they can be seen playing, they are hybrid, grow food on their own bodies and nobody sleeps empty stomach,” she says.

Just as in Lewis Carroll’s world where Alice asks the White Rabbit: “How long is forever?” “Sometimes, just one second,” answers the Rabbit. It’s a bit like that in Sugandh’s paintings. Birds, animals and insects pause and accelerate all at once. It’s as if each of them is on a journey. If in “A piece of mine is now yours” we see birds pulling the strings of a found object — a nest, in “Dilli”, she has used the mechanism of a clock and watercolours to paint dragonflies and octopus hands to make time tick.

“My artworks are a way to solve the ‘what if’ questions in my mind. For instance, there was a dove on my balcony and it was raining heavily, so I wondered what if that dove had an umbrella attached to her head so that she can fly freely without getting drenched,” she says.

Vartaman

During her summer holidays of 2014, Sugandh, then a Master of Art student at Amity University, visited Jaipur’s City Palace. There she saw miniature artists at work and then there was no looking back. “Under the guidance of Shri Badrinarayanji, I learned miniature drawing techniques, how to control the pressure of brush and how to use natural pigments. After returning to Delhi I practiced it a lot, as I didn’t want to forget it,” she says. It meant drawing a line many times over till she perfected the art of detailing. It shows in the fur one sees on a monkey’s back, in the juice sac of a sliced lemon or in the fine antennae of an insect, in each of her paintings.

“The initial works I did in the series were ‘Ann’, ‘Ghar’, ‘Sukh’, ‘Seva’ and ‘Hum’. I always draw movement to tell a story of my characters. I want viewers to interact with my work through its sound, touch and functionality. I think the works tickle our senses and create a sense of playfulness and curiosity,” says the artist whose interest in art was recognised by her mother when Sugandh was all of four years of age.

“As a child, I always had low self-confidence. I found comfort in nature. For instance, just beyond the boundary wall of our house, there was a big tree that I used to call ‘Bunny’. I would have picnics with the tree, serving two plates of chips and two glasses of coke, offering it to my friend who never judged me. I remember that I used to blow bubbles around it as well and Bunny became my source of comfort, connection and enjoyment. I would observe how a wasp selects a place to build its nest and makes it so strong that no matter what it won’t fall and how a bird would select each piece of twig very consciously to build itself a nest,” she says.

A piece of me is now yours too

Her vivid imagination brings to her canvas the world of possibilities, where “apples grow gramophones and gramophones sprout lily filaments, where kiwi balloons fly and when you peel a banana you might just eat a pomegranate”.

The show closes on October 31

From the homepage

Devendra Fadnavis orders probe into alleged Pune land deal linked to Ajit Pawar’s son Parth

ED attaches Suresh Raina, Shikhar Dhawan’s Rs 11.14 crore assets in betting app money laundering probe

Video of prisoners dancing in Ranchi jail goes viral, 2 officials suspended