Of cubism & creativity

Amarjot Kaur

As much as it is a converging point of art that came out of five art workshops and a three-day school trip to Banjar Valley, The Tribune Model School’s visual art exhibition is also a product of the school’s collective consciousness towards art.

Titled Kala Sangam—The Joy of Creativity, it is for the first time in five years that the annual exhibition stepped out of the school’s premises and into the Government Museum and Art Gallery, Sector10. With 168 artworks on display made by students as young as 12 years of age, Kala Sangam is invariably imbued with the style and sensibilities of the 20th century art movement’s proto-cubism, high cubism, and abstract cubism. “Next year, perhaps, you may get to see works on impressionism,” says Amanpreet Kaur, the school’s art teacher.

From tile painting to marble painting, and best out of waste to murals and caricatures, the exhibition explores creative experiments by students who have been enthusiastically engaging in several workshops organised by the school during this session. Earlier this year, the school had organised workshops on caricature making, tile painting, fabric painting, marble painting and mural making. Two murals, one of which is titled Medley in Gold, have been made by students of Class V to Class VIII in mixed media on plywood. Borrowing Picasso and Braque’s style of cubism, the students have created an aesthetic interpretation of a dialogue between textures and mosaic. Called Connectivity, a mural by Sarika and Gurleen Kaur of Class VIII evokes a sense of understanding between man and nature in the urban environment. “We have used saw dust, plaster of Paris, and ropes to make these murals on plywood. For textures we used puti and for mosaics we used broken pieces of tiles,” the duo says. 

Titled Colours of Nature, the tile-painting artwork, an installation of over a dozen tiles on plywood, explores nature and its elements. “We were taught this at the tile-painting workshop and the material was provided to us by the school too. We’ve used shilpkar and glass paint on tiles,” say Harmanpreet Singh and Tanveer Singh of Class VIII.

Keeping in mind its ex-students, the school also invited pencil-sketch portraits by Amandeep Chaudhary, who is now a student at Government College of Arts in Sector 10. There are photographs too; some clicked during the school trip to Banjar Valley, while others at the Chattbir Zoo. On display are as many as 22 works inspired by the beauty and bounty of nature. The young artists have developed a language of their own to communicate and connect with the viewers through the use of colours, lines, patterns and forms. 

While Pransh recreates a night scene, with a girl enjoying the rain, Aneesh is inspired by the masks of the African tribes and uses this imagery on canvas. The idea of his work is deep, as he feels in today’s world, many people wear masks to hide their true or real identity. Sidharth creates a painting where he uses the form of a tree and the face of a mother to express how, like a mother, trees nurture life on earth. Sahil experiments with forms and shades to depict a beam of life and Rishu believes we should bloom like flowers and be happy, so he creates a work that is joyous. The section also has some relief work, depicting animal life, flowers, birds, scenes of nature as well as marble, tile and fabric paintings. Creativity flows here, without any barriers or boundaries. Members of the Eco Club, with their ingenuity, have crafted as many as 84 useful articles from discarded material in the Best Out of  Waste section, reinforcing the philosophy that nothing is useless and can be reused and recycled.

It concludes today. 

amarjot@tribunemail.com