Colours of countryside

The Hindu, March 16, 2007
by SERISH NANISETTI

The artist from Orissa is making colourful waves.

Kesinga is a speck of a railway station on the Vizianagaram-Raipur line that is bathed in greenery, has an interesting backdrop of mountains and flowing streams during monsoon. Beginning his journey in this scenic hamlet in the blighted Kalahandi district in Orissa, Kashinath Jena brings the torch of art to Hyderabad at the Lakshana Art Gallery.

Inside the gallery are rows of paintings that evoke nature as well as the spiritual. The colours are bright and brilliant figurative works that have a calendar-like quality about them. What stands out is the outline in white "I have used a white outline to balance the bright colours that I use for my subjects," says Jena who has used the theme of Radha and Krishna for his series.

"Every two years I change my theme, my muse," he says, as he talks about his forthcoming exhibition themed around Gita Gobind in Delhi sometime in December.

Using acrylics on canvas, Jena uses the matte feel of the canvas to suffuse and shade his bright colours. It is nature at is bountiful best as the bulls and cows have a rotundity about them just as his subjects of Radha and Krishna frolic in the sun with all the fleshy outsized proportions etched carefully. Using translucent acrylics, with white outlines and fleshy contoured bodies, Jena's works have a timeless quality about them.

But why only divine (his earlier series included Ganesha and Hanuman)? "We cannot live without nature or God. If one fails we will have a problem and if the other is angry, the world will end. Both are needed and I see beauty in both of them," he says.