Artist Nita Banerji records her observations with water colours and pen & ink

Team L&M

Nita Banerji took up painting and drawing over three decades ago and has been affirming her skills ever since. A self-taught artist, she began with water colours and then moved to colour pencils and pen and ink.

Her ongoing show at The Art Gallery, India International Centre, New Delhi, Black and White and Colour has 53 works, half of which about half are black and white (pen and ink) while the rest are done with water colours or colour pencils. “These art works have been done over the last five-six years,” says the Chandigarh-based artist.

Interestingly, the art exhibition has no underlying theme. Each of these works is born out of her keen observation of things around her. For the artist, everything she sees is worth seeing, worth really looking at, even worth staring at. That’s how she manages to capture these sights in such fine detail, allowing the viewer to see each one over and over again and to experience all the attendant reactions and feelings. Her eye is caught by a wide variety of subjects, from the mundane to the sublime. “Each art work is a matter of what I saw and how I wanted to record and convey it,” she says, adding that the choice of subject usually dictates the medium, but there are no hard and fast rules.

Elated with the response her show is getting, she says, “I have had some extremely positive comments from viewers. What has proved interesting is the comment that the pictures say it all, as opposed to non-representational art where it is felt the viewer has some work to do.”

While the pandemic changed almost everything about life as we knew it, Nita kept going. Twice she was hit by Covid, but that didn’t keep her away from her art. Perhaps, it is this creation that helped her recover faster.

“I’m a somewhat reclusive person and so the confinement of the pandemic didn’t make much difference to me vis-a-vis ‘art connoisseurs’,” she says, adding that during the early part of the pandemic she was driven towards pen and ink, ie black – and white.

“I work every day and without that life would be very boring,” says Banerji who earlier exhibited at AIFACS and India Habitat Centre.

Other than painting, she loves to play bridge.

The show is on till August 31, 11am to 7pm