PARESH HAZRA

Born in Tamluk, Midnapore District, West Bengal in 1952.  He completed his Art education from the Government Art College, Calcutta, did his post graduation in the Teaching of Art in 1980 and continued his career as an Art Teacher in Bangalore till 2005. He has had 25 solo exhibitions at various cities in India and abroad.  He has participated in group shows in Germany, France, UK, USA and Switzerland, where many of his paintings are in important personal collections.  He has received the Silver Medal at the Oriental Art Society, Calcutta in 1977 and the Birla Academy Award, Calcutta in 1990. Paresh dresses his characters with a puppet like quality. His richly textured work unveils the emotions of simple folk. In the early 1990s, he had started working on his most favorite medium Old Egg Tempera (OET), a technique that he had learnt from Christian Puard, a French painter.

The application technique of this medium was completely different from what he had learned at Art College. Paresh has established this old egg tempera practice as part of as his own identity through his artworks. He uses only natural pigment colors and no other commercial or synthetic colors and processes and also at the same time experiments on the surface matrix creating innovative effects. Paresh thinks of himself as a Storyteller, He always has some story to tell without which he feels his narrative of the painting is incomplete. Every painting has a story to tell, whether he tells it or lets the viewers imagine it. Over the last year, characters from his different endeavors have come alive as a mix of imagination, reality and humor. Paresh says ”The heroines of my work from the on-going series - ‘Lady and her Cat’ are sometimes related to me, perhaps, someone I was curious about or dreamt of. And today, they are revisiting me in through my work. Many a times, I am not able to speak my mind and share how I feel about them. Today, they take up important forms through my paintings, poems and stories. I may not meet many of these characters again in reality, but I often revisit them through my thoughts and paintings.” I have used a very old and simple technique of gouache, and have become a cat romanticizing the ailurophiles in these works. And now they have further evolved to reflect the present situation of the pandemic and social isolation. He lives and works in Bangalore.