In 2004, Sharmistha was the recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant awarded to only ten emerging painters and sculptors in the U.S. every year for the series of paintings Crossroads (2003-2004).
She deployed the grant funds to travel to India on an exploratory mission in January 2006. “I wanted to see what India could do to me and, in turn what I could do in India,” she says. “Looking back, it was like closing my eyes and take a deep sea dive. I just had to follow my instincts.”
On arriving in India, Sharmistha spent ten months in Kolkata, the city of her origins, where she set up a painting studio. There, she experimented first with a highly stylized and symbolic form of painting to capture the essence of the kantha (or ‘running’) stitch that she encountered in textiles all over the city. Sharmistha combined this style with images of local city scenes like canoes on the river, animals pulling loads and sari-clad brides in a series called Between the Lines (2006).
For a few months, Sharmistha explored an abstract way of expressing the experience of living in Kolkata through light, color and gesture, eventually moving away from geometrically inspired forms into a narrative form of abstraction. The intimately sized oil paintings combined the thematics of displacement with a faux emotive narrative voice to create the self-reflexive series of paintings Traversations (2006).
In August 2006, Sharmistha took a trip to Mumbai, and moved there a month later. ”With its visual and sensory overloads, living in Mumbai is like one long electric shock,” says Sharmistha. “Through abstract painting, I want to express metaphorical worlds that uncover the experience of the city with its hyper energies, violently colliding and overlapping worlds and intense cacophonies of sounds, colors and shades. My paintings should describe Mumbai, with its textures, nuances and eccentricities, but abstractly not literally.”
Likewise, the highly charged and expressive nature of Sharmistha’s color palette and gestural style evokes the intensity, speed, violence and beauty of the city she has adopted as her own. She streaks, spills, splatters, pours and scrapes paint over the surface of the canvas. Areas of thick paint are applied as quickly as they are scooped off. Color is mixed with various tools directly onto the surface of the canvas and paint is moved around in a highly active and performing manner.
Eventually, the painting, through an exhaustive and emotive activity, arrives at its conclusion. “The beauty of the work may not be immediately apparent, and that’s because I am not trying to arrive at a logical conclusion,” Sharmistha says. “Painting is a highly emotive act to plumb the psychological depth of my own experience. The process is both the means and the end. I want the painting to become something I never expected.” She concludes, “The end result should always defy my expectations.”
Currently, Sharmistha is working on a series of Abstract Paintings (2009-present) that take their cue from Indian symbols and iconographies, distilling them into an abstract language.
Sharmistha’s paintings have been exhibited in the U.S. and India and her art works are in private collections worldwide. Her first solo exhibition of paintings in India is at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai, in January 2012.
(Photo credit: Ashima Mehra)