Come June and one starts fanaticising grey thundering clouds covering the sky cool breezes and prays for rainfall. We just celebrated the environment Day. US pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord; Canada went ahead with it wholly, while at the same time committing to market their country’s resources of oil… India on the other hand committed to start selling only electric cars by 2030. In the wake of it all, Lina Vincent Sunish discusses Environmental Consciousness in existing Indian art practise. Priyanka Tagore looks back at the artistic journey of celebrated artist Arpana Caur through her recent exhibition in Four Decades: A Painter’s Journey, a retrospective of her work held at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru, with over a hundred works by the artist on display.

Rajesh Punj is in conversation with Eddie Martinez regarding his technique as a lesson in letting things happen; Martinez employs much of the abstract vigour of fellow Americans Philip Guston and Arshile Gorky, in an attempt to coax the canvas into these concocted scenes of belligerent beauty. Stuart Semple artist and curator talks candidly with Indira Lakshmi Prasad about his views on Anish Kapoor’s securing exclusive rights to a certain black colour ‘Vantablack’ the blackest of all absorbing 99.96% of light and Semple’s apt reply to the celebrated artist in creating a competing shade of black Black 2.0 and barring Anish Kapoor from being able to purchase the same.

Dr. Aparna Roy Baliga looks back through the lens of history exploring the art of Rani Chanda, sister of Mukul Dey and a contemporary of greats like Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose who also had the opportunity of having him (Nandalal) as a teacher early on as a student at Santiniketan; she was also a true artivist being part of the Swadeshi movement.

Partha Dasgupta narrates an overview of a ceramics workshop organised by the Lalit Kala Kendra, Kolkata Regional Centre, Lalit Kala Akademi. Saraswathi Devi Bhattathiri takes the exhibition ‘Regional Modernity-Madras Art School 1960s -80s’ recently curated by Dr Ashrafi Bhagat as a point of reference and stimulates various thoughts of the spiritual in art from the contextual to the regional on the presiding issue, modernity. Have a good summer.

Happy Reading! Siddhartha Tagore