Mindscape In Cyberspace

Self-portrait – The Unwanted
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The above illustration shows a hypothetical self-portrait, that I have drawn last year for a personal project. The reason behind calling it ‘hypothetical’, is the fact that this self-portrait does not exactly portray my physical features and tries to bring out my psycho-somatic conditions at that particular moment. I aptly named it, “Self-portrait – The Unwanted”.

Early Story Illustration (1989)
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One more illustration from the initial days of my career in pre-digital era. In 1989-90, I used to work for a daily news paper as an illustrator and commercial artist. The attached illustration is one of the hundreds illustrations that I have drawn for them, during this period. Being a literature enthusiast and an avid reader of all literary forms, I used to enjoy the stories as well, for which I was supposed to draw the illustrations and my formal education in language and literature used to help me a lot to come up with the most effective illustrations for them.

Book Cover: Ceiling of Clouds
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Being an avid reader of Bengali poetry and an Bengali literature enthusiast, I always take special interests in the design initiatives that are related to Bengali literature and language. I have designed covers and illustrations for many Bengali poetry collections, novels, short story collections, literature magazines and other similar Bengali publications. Though, I always enjoy working for Bengali books and magazines, I often get really excited if I am working on books that are written or edited by my favorite Bengali authors and poets.

All the covers featured in this post are for poetry collections or novels written by my favorite Bengali authors and poets. It was more than mere professional satisfaction, when I received accolades for these covers from the writer or poet, himself. Quite natural for a designer who loves literature, isn’t it?

Book Cover: The Other Side of the Bread
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Book Cover: Eh Lulu!
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Story Illustration for Newspaper (1990)
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One more story illustration from the early days of my career as an artist and designer. Pen and ink is still one of my favorite analog drawing media and I guess, my love for this particular media has started back in 1989-90, when I was working on these illustrations for a Bengali Daily.

Digital Illustration
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This is another illustration type I have drawn for the anti-human trafficking project for UNIFEM/Equations. At the visualization stage I tried to come up with a various illustration forms with different emotional quotients. The illustration I have shown in one of my previous post was less emotional and more associated with logical deduction of actual activities and its physical references. Unlike the previous one, the illustration shown above in this post is more attached with emotional suggestions. The key phrases for this illustration were, Compassion, Sympathy and Humanity. Where as for the previous one, the key words I had in my mind while designing, are Plan, Development, Result and Hope. Below is a thumbnail image for the previous illustration, I mentioned.

Previous illustration:

Story Illustration for daily newspaper (1989)
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This illustration is from my old paper-made folder of story illustrations from the my ‘teen’ days that I have done for news paper, during 89-90! I started working as an illustrator and commercial artist while I was still in my college, pursuing my graduation in Literature.

This particular illustration is one of my favorites from that era. I still remember very clearly that how I used the nozzle of a watercolor tube to draw the basic thick lines to form the figure, directly on the paper without any pen, pencil or brushwork and then tried to bring out the details with small strokes and thin lines of a felt pen. The thick, long lines drawn by nozzle  and the finer and shorter lines by felt pen, when juxtaposed with each other, broght out the field of depht, quite successfully, irrespective of the limitation of space, tones, and colors.

Illustration: Under Construction
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An illustration I have done for a UNIFEM project. The project was to document the progress of various NGOs working in the area of human trafficking with fund provided by UNIFEM. I have visited those organizations and tried to capture visual references of the development and work happening there. Later, I created various collages with the photographs taken at the spot and tried to bring out my understanding about the development happened there. The illustration shown above, was for an NGO who has started to construct a huge building for the benefits of the victims of human trafficking. The building is yet to be completed, but one can easily see their hopes and happiness, around this building, still under construction. When I was there, I captured multiple low angle shots of various parts of that incomplete building and later, combined those photographs to create a collage that emphasizes on the hope of the members of the NGO, around this building, still under construction.

Rampage
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Being an avid gamer I used to spend lots of time on various versions of famous game series GTA – scheming a ‘rampage’, planning ‘bomb blasts’, executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’. This image is a kind of extension of my visual memories of those virtual images of deaths and blood and blasts, juxtaposed against our real context – a blasting population, often threatened, disturbed by deaths and murders, mass killings and genocides. It’s all about our time - restless and anxious, like the central character of GTA, standing in the middle of the blood and bodies of ‘wasted gang members’.

The Bengali text on the image says, ‘Our time’, repeatedly.

This work has been featured on the cover of Autumn 2007 issue of International Journal, published by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC). Thanks to CIC and IJ.

Reconstruction:
I believe, every time viewer sees a painting or any other visual art, he tries to construct/reconstruct his own painting, using the elements available within physical and/or psychological frame of the ‘original’ painting being seen, within his mind. He creates his own image that emerges from the original image; and then starts interacting with this new image within his mindscape. The ‘original’ image becomes secondary here, at this pint, and works only as inspiration; and sometimes as reference. The more he interacts with this newly constructed image, it changes and the visual characteristics of the viewer’s gaze become more and more prominent, replacing the same of the ‘original’ artist.

In this series “Reconstruction: Level 1-3”, I have tried to capture various phases of this mental reconstruction by the viewer. My effort was to depict, how viewer’s perspective can replace, the perspective of the ‘original’ painter.

The so called, ‘original’ work is done by Suman Kalyan Ghosh, an artist and painter from Kolkata. Suman, being my friend for years, keeps sending me letters, photographs and also samples of his recent works. The one I have chosen, is an untitled abstract in pastel that Suman painted in 2005.

Reconstruction: Level 1

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The painting is not framed and pinned up on the soft board beside my table in my cabin. I took a snap of a very small part of the image from an unusual angle. I have consciously included the signature of Suman, at strategic position within the frame, so that it can add value the entire composition as a visual element, too. I have also included the yellow board pin that has been used to put the original painting on the board. I have introduced external elements, shapes and colors and the image already looks like a separate composition.

Reconstruction: Level 2

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This is Level 2 of the “Reconstruction” series. The board pin is now playing more vital role in the composition. The signature of ‘original’ artist became more visually integrated with the entire image and repetition of visual elements has started changing the persona of the image, gradually.

Reconstruction: Level 3

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As the reconstruction goes on, the personality of the image keeps changing. A faint hint of my urban complication starts sipping in into Suman’s subconscious innocence.

[To Be Continued]

The Season of Watermelons
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I see the dead watermelons, in this season, red and sliced. This season of watermelons gonna be hard, ruthless, I think. The chopper, steel and cold, slits and slices deep in this season, quite often. And someone writes a big ‘3′ on our adultarated blood, with red ink, in this season.

Honestly, in this season of watermelons, in this April, it’s all red, and sliced inside our mind.*

Read the original text in Bengali here
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* I often create images that are directly related to a piece of text. The text contributes to the visual expressions of the image and the image loses its relevance, without the text. The attached image is one of those text-dependant images. The original text is in Bengali (mentioned above in Bengali Unicode) and later I tried to translate the same in English. I do not think the English version is effective enough to bring out the essence of the Bengali text. But that was my best try!