Gallery Beyond, Mumbai conducted the third of the series of workshops being held in Goa. 15 Artists from Mumbai, Baroda, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Kochi and Goa came together from the 19th to 25th July2019,10 where the artists did what they do best, paint.

The participating artists are

Prabhakar Kolte, Mumbai Antonio Ecosta, Goa Jayshree Chakraborty,Kolkata Manish Pushkale, New Delhi Chandra Bhattacharjee, Kolkata Brinda Miller, Mumbai Vanita Gupta, Mumbai Ganesh Gohain, Baroda Sanatana Gohain, Baroda Rajan Krishnan, Kochi Puneet Kaushik, New Delhi Sanam C.N, Ahmedabad Rajesh Ahlawat, Mumbai Shirish Desai, Goa Brahm Maira, New Delhi

They worked in varied mediums: Paper, Canvas, Photography. It is not a thematic workshop but inadvertently, most of the artists present in the workshop work in the genre of Abstraction and Abstract expressionism.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

PRABHAKAR KOLTE He seeks to immediately cover up any identifiable image, making sure that his forms function as pure colour in space. His most recent works show a glossier, more finished approach to his early themes in paintings. The strong ground colour remains, but this time both it and the forms overlaid onto it retain a crispness in line and colour: the "weathering" inherited from Klee has dropped out in favor of more finished - and thus more abstracted - fields of colour.

ANTONIO ECOSTA Of Indian origin, Antonio was brought up in Kenya, in Africa, and trained in Canada in Fine Arts, Urban Design and Environmental Studies, Having travelled all through his formative years, he has drawn inspiration to painting from different geographies and cultural situations. With art as his medium, he embarks on a spiritual experience; a particular form of seeing that illuminates found objects and landscapes with a personal light. His search for a deeper emotion became the prime motivation behind exploration of imagery, and resulted in his evolution as an artist, producing works such as the 201Contemplative Landscape 201C series in 2003 and the 201C Buddha 201C series in 2005.

MANISH PUSHKALE Pushkale2019s art is intrinsically linked with the mythological, without making overt references to the same. A subdued colour palette lends a lingering calm to his works. However, on a closer examination, the motifs and symbols in his art come to light, giving it different meanings. Subtle brush strokes and shading create multi-layered meaning.

BRINDA MILLER A strong sense of rhythm and movement, colour and volume energise the work of Brinda Chudasama Miller. In her acrylics, form and its abstraction seem to surface separate and merge in a continuous interplay of light and shadow. Over the years her painterly journey has taken Brinda on a quest to intimately understand and manipulate the materials and agents she works with so that their inherent strengths and vulnerabilities are successfully harnessed to reinforce her compositions. Like an alchemist driven to extract precious metals from a secret configuration of materials submitted to fire and heat, she uses a wide spectrum of mediums and techniques to conjure an elemental and organic world of texture and form that highlight her stylistic vocabulary. As a painter, Brinda revels in the sheer lila, playful delineation of the shifting perspectives of nature and environment, of capturing the tonal energy of pigment, of inventing a plethora of surface textures interwoven with multiple layers and imprints of ridged, stripped and masked areas that characterize her work.

GANESH GOHAIN Vision is abstract, but the visual is realistic. Shadow has volume and dimension; I realize that as a sculptor while I draw the surface, layer after layer, they also create dimension in space. "Towards The Sky" creates a huge space through the visionary study of the visual experience of the surface. It is a visual biography of an individual, his existence in space and in the space of time

CHANDRA BHATTACHARJEE Chandra Bhattacharjee's canvases are languid and far removed from the urban world. Dusky men and women exist in an ethereal realm untouched by the madness of everyday city life, carrying out their daily chores. Bhattacharjee's compositions are influenced by the rural and tribal associations that he had an opportunity to work with; particularly the 'Santhal' tribe of Calcutta. The textural quality of his paintings is strongly reminiscent of the traditional mud walls of these villages, smeared with cow-dung.

The colours in Bhattacharjee's paintings are at once, subdued and vibrant. Warm pinks, full-bodied blues, interspersed with blank areas, soothe the senses. He uses the technique of crosshatching (a method used more often in pencil drawings), in black, over the colour; this adds depth to his colours. Bhattacharjee's paintings tell a story, but it is a story without a beginning or an end and it flows seamlessly from the artist onto the surface of the canvas. The world of Bhattacharjee's creation is without boundaries; where humans, animals and surreal creatures coexist in harmony.

RAJAN KRISHNAN Born in Kerala, Rajan Krishnan 2019s art is very sensitive to his immediate natural environment. The fields and villages of the Kerala of his youth play the role of 2018 principal protagonist 2019 in most of his works, expressing his deepest aesthetic proclivities. His earlier works are slightly sentimental in their depiction of childhood memories of home, but this phase seems to have given way to a more assertive cynicism that unflinchingly records the sweeping changes wrought on the landscapes he has known and loved. His works voice the disenchantment with urbanization and the environmental degradation that it has brought with it. 2018 Instead of paddy, concrete and consumerist debris grow in these fields 201D. Bleak realities of the urban landscapes that Rajan confronts everyday.

VANITA GUPTA While referring to her work, artist Vanita Gupta says, 201C I believe in the ardent need to paint, nothing more nothing less. 201D This single statement explains how, although minimal, Gupta 2019s work is always complete. The dynamics of her images, however, are constantly evolving; she experiments with size and texture but the solid white background on which her paintings are mounted remains constant. Gupta 2019s monochromatic compositions, rendered almost fluidly with her masterly brushwork, leave the viewer captivated by their Zen-like quality. Since her first solo show in 1994, Gupta has worked assiduously towards mastering the multiple techniques by which paint may be applied onto a surface. In her more recent works, the viewer can instantly recognize her command over mark making techniques and the effortless way in which she now maneuvers between speed and patience, discovery and concealment. Her brushstrokes, varying from a drip to a splash or draggle, suggest a deep intimacy between solidity and the ambiguous nature of liquids.

SANTANA GOHAIN My work images are image of some surface where I get connected to it from my surroundings. There is a human natural tendency to feel the nature or anything which creates curiosity, and that curiosity gives inspiration to do my images through a process which is important to realize my existence and the language of my own.

PUNEET KAUSHIK Puneet Kaushik disagrees to the agreement of the difference between the cultural objects and their 2018 effects 2019 2013 be it that of aesthetics, politics or merely perceptual nuance. The common sense perception that there comes the object first, creates the cultured impact like a torch emitting light, further stays as object 2013 in   2013 itself, even after such a trace an impact gets over, like an emptied perfume bottle. Puneet 2019s works treat this premise as the area of contestation but not that of confrontation.

SANAM C N Sanam C.N is a Graduate of BFA 2013 Sculpture, RLV College, Tripunithura. After the academic practice, I was shifting my sculptural practices in to some of large drawing planes, I was dealing with a subject like globalization, marginalization, alienation, 2026 the changes or say the phenomenon like the emergence and inversion of new social strategies and social dilemmas. As an artist my practice and representations are almost transcend and indirect, the drawings were a visual allegories of the things that I happened to see around. Within this terrain I was keen about some motives, objects, shapes or even color. All these things are very less resistive against the so called development of a consumer society. The images that I used were very specific, the trees, the part or fruits of trees, the space in between the ecosystem, the tools, the shelter being used by the fisherman, and then the buildings, small houses etc were the important ones. All the image representations were a totality of both geometrical and spontaneous outburst of mind, I also dealt with the idea of space and the mass area of land, it may be urban or rural space. The ecological space can play the role of a metaphor of changes, marginalization, and the urbanization

RAJESH AHLAWAT Rajesh Ahlawat, a self taught artist, comes from a back ground of the armed forces. Physically fit with a keen mind, his work reflects the constance of movement, travel, separation, new places, people, experiences. His works, in the genre of 201CAbstract expressionism 201D are paintings out of his unconscious, where figures are bound to emerge. They are about a state of mind, a self discovery.

SHIRISH DESAI Graduate of Goa College of Arts, dabbled in photo journalism and drawings, working for The Navin Times, Goa. Subsequently found his niche in photography and has been a cinematographer for the last many years. But old habits die hard. The painting bug never left him. He has continued painting all through, till date.

BRAHM MAIRA Brahm Maira, a graduate of Sydney College of Art, The University of Sydney, has done a BVA in Photo Media. Shooting professionally for the last five years, he has done an extremely diverse body of work covering most genres of commercial photography, as well as working closely with art galleries, curators & collectors. Brahm has established himself as an outstanding photo manipulation artist. 201C The medium of photography never ceases to amaze me, with its ability to turn the ordinary into something magical, its ability to transcend the physical barrier of time. Sometimes I think of my work as a crossover of reality fantasy as I incorporate elements from both to produce the final work. My work, apart from being snippets & manipulations of the physical world we live in replicated in two dimensions, is an exploration of the different realms of consciousness & am continually fascinated by the different ways it manifests itself 201D says Brahm