Sanjay Bhattacharya:
The Versatile player of color
Santanu Ganguly
Whether the old vacant houses telling their stories or the realistic portraitures/scenes, Sanjay Bhattacharya successfully connects and subtly conveys the inner perceptions and outer realities under the absolute realism of his works. Santanu Ganguly observes.
Sanjay goes back in the past… “In the silence of the night when I take a break from my work and sit alone in the balcony, I see a young boy walking along the footpath at Park Street, towards the bank at Outram Ghat or sitting at the Howrah or Sealdah stations. He always has a bag on his shoulder and a drawing board in his hand. Black clouds cover the sky while people take shelter from the rain, but the boy sits on the steps of the monument under an open sky – and the rain pours. The streets are full of crowds and everyone is running. He does not know for what? He is sitting on the huge iron pipes at Metro Railways, placed on the mud hills on the sides of Park Street. He sits for hours – from evening to midnight – with no one to ask for any explanation! Freedom? Maybe that is what makes him move from the roof of the New Market to a place under the Howrah Bridge; a feeling, which he cannot explain but which makes him wander and sketch even late into the Durga Puja evenings. He has a desire to sleep in the Curzon Park, an eagerness to stand apart from the crowd, to be involved with colour and brush, an interest to see people with their peculiarities. He even has a pain for ruined houses, the whisper of their doors and windows. These keep taking this boy away from himself towards an unknown world. He is walking in the silence of the night with his bag on his shoulder and a board in his hand, he goes far and fades away.The fire of the cigarette touches my finger and shakes me. I put it off and stop retrospecting. I make believe that I am still that young boy painting innocently.
I sit silently as the chowkidar hits his iron rod on the street-thud-thud-thud. I sit before my blank canvas and go ahead with my work.” Sanjay Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1958. According to Sanjay, though he stood first in standard one he was never a very good student at school, always happy with his average status. He went to the City College for B. Com, but obviously not to obtain a bachelor degree but to leave everything in between and join the Government College of Arts & Crafts in Calcutta, where he cleared the admission test in the first attempt, though the grade was the lowest one, C-3. In the first year college annual show, two of his works were selected. Second year onward he started to show his interest in water colour. Oil started in the third year. The legend Bikash Bhattacharya was in the faculty of the Govt. Art College. He liked Sanjay’s work very much and told the whole college to see his work. At the fifth year, nine of his works were selected for the annual show. He got the Vacation Award of Thirty rupees while all his works were sold in between Rs. 250 – 270/-. He received a First Class Diploma in Fine Arts from the Government College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta in 1982.
