JYOTI BHATT

Born in March 1934 at Bhavnagar in Gujarat. Jyotibhai, as Jyoti Bhatt is fondly called completed his studies in painting and printmaking at Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. He is one of the founder members of the Center of Photography, Baroda. Before he turned to photography, however, He began his artistic career as a printmaker in the 1950s. Bhatt worked in a variety of mediums, including watercolors and oils but it is his printmaking that ultimately got him the attention. In 1966 Bhatt returned to M.S.U. Baroda with a thorough knowledge of the intaglio process that he had gained at the Pratt Institute at Brooklyn in New York. It was partially Bhatt’s enthusiasm for intaglio that caused other artists such as Jeram Patel, Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh to take up the same process. Bhatt, and his compatriots at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, soon came to be known as "The Baroda School" of Indian art. His screen prints have explored and re-explored a personal language of symbols that stem from Indian culture: the peacock, the parrot, the lotus, stylized Indian gods and goddesses, and His screen prints explore the unending variations on tribal and village designs of parrots and peacocks, gods and goddesses flowers and trees.