Pranati Panda

Pranati Panda

She works like a traditional embroidery artist. An intimate feeling emanates from her lines and doodles. Red used to be the predominant colour in her works. She is Pranati Panda, a Gurgaon based artist. Her arrival was heralded when she exhibited a few of her drawings in a couple of group shows held in Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery and Aarushi Art Gallery in 2006. Pranati Panda became a sought after name within no time.

“Why is this craze for Pranati’s works?”
“Where was she till date?”
Questions could be innumerable. An artist, who has been around and working in a slow and silent pace for the last ten years, in reality did not want to exhibit her works quite often. “I work in a different time and scale, which perhaps do not go well with the pace of the current art scene in India,” she says.

Hailing from Orissa, Pranati did her Graduation in Applied Art from the BK College of Arts and Crafts, Bhubaneswar. Following that she did a course in Computer Graphics and Animation from NIMT, Bhubaneswar. She took her post graduation in Applied Arts from College of Art, New Delhi in 2000. Though trained in applied arts and also worked in the advertising field for a few years, Pranati took to serious painting and drawing when she shifted her base to London with her husband Jagannath Panda, who is also a well known contemporary Indian artist.

Interestingly, Pranati’s works do not show the characteristics that are peculiar to an applied artist. Her sensibilities are refined enough to defy the choreographed strictness of the advertisement art. The canvases she had attempted earlier show her interest in certain colour schemes. However, she did not go on painting in the similar vein. Her shifting to the medium of paper was quite a revelation for her. “I could establish a quick and intimate communication with paper. I could sit at a table and pour myself out on it. The process was revealing and exciting for me,” observes Pranati.

A set of drawings that Pranati did in early 2006 had imageries from a very sensitive personal lexicon. They take the viewer through an umbilical experience. The red lines look like the trails cleared by a mother. The stitched and added up masses of forms look like a creative mass yet to be expressed. They emblematized a motherly landscape of mental and biological understanding. A surreptitious and silent give and take between the known and unknown was expressed in these drawings.

Somebody would tend to call these early drawings as ‘Winter Drawings’. Then the latest set of Pranati’s works should be called ‘Spring Drawings’. There is a blooming in them. The predominant red lines have given way to various shades of blues, yellows and oranges. The artist seems to be in a celebratory mode. Her tendency to act upon the works using various materials has become less aggressive in nature. They look more decorative and jovial in the new drawings. “I work very slowly,” says Pranati. Her works would be shown in a solo show at the Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi in September 2007 and in a group show organized by Chemould Gallery, Mumbai next year.