No wasted art, this

Recycling

Old fashioned iron lock and keys, window and balcony grills — such abandoned household items or automobile scraps.

Give them to Narayan Sinha, an upcoming sculptor-painter from Nalhati, a far flung hamlet in Bengal’s Birbhum district, and he will turn them into works of art.

At a time when going green is the watchword, Sinha’s work, using recycled products, is all the more relevant. He has used a cart wheel as a chandelier and old window frames for the back rest of furniture.

And in his recent interior designing project of transforming an old house into an art boutique named EKRU in Kolkata, he has used cement, gravel, vegetable dye and cloth as raw materials.

Creation is what has come best to Sinha since childhood. The journey started with clay modelling during school vacations. But staying at Nalhati, he often faced the problem of obtaining clay, the primary raw material. Since his father was a dealer of automobile parts, he often toyed with them and the result was new forms made from unused tools and machines. After his graduation, Sinha became a full time sculptor.

In order to fine tune his art, he learnt clay modelling and charcoal painting from the art students of Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. Since his first exhibition in 2000 at Bajaj Bhavan, Mumbai, there has been no looking back. A number of successful exhibitions have followed since.

Sinha’s subjects are intrinsically traditional and Indian in essence. “I can’t work on abstract forms as I can’t relate to them. My subjects are emotional responses and I try to reach a ‘higher being’ through sculpture. My other aspiration is to promote Indian art and artists. My assistants at my workshops are school dropouts. I have given them the necessary training and they are now artists working with me,” he says.

Sinha’s sculptures have already adorned Kolkata’s sprawling and historic Raj Bhavan and Writers’ Buildings.

Accolades and recognitions are not new to Sinha as his successful exhibitions in New York, Paris and many other countries have got rave reviews. Four years of research and practice and Sinha now has to his credit as many as 35 different forms of Goddess Durga, made from trivia.

His exhibition of Goddess Durga’s forms, named ‘Debi’, has been a huge success, with invitations pouring in from various parts of the world to take the exhibition abroad.
“I spend long hours, sometimes 14 to 18 hours a day, to give shape to my creations.

Collecting and sourcing the raw material for my works is also a painstaking and time consuming affair. I have gathered material from different parts of the country like Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the southern states which has in turn added a diverse tinge of ethnicity to the end products,” tells Sinha.

His sculptures are all made at his large workshop at Nalhati. Some of these structures are as tall as 10 ft. Many of his paintings are also displayed on the walls of his workshop.

Sinha insists on uniqueness. Not one of his works is a repetition. He also carefully studies different forms of traditional architecture in different parts of the country and tries to reflect them in his creations.

Sinha is versatile too. His jewellery in brass, pearls and semi-precious stones are available in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune. This is not all. Handmade jewellery and knick-knacks designed by him have graced Tina Ambani’s Harmony Art Shows and are also used by fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee in his shows.

An Indian at heart, Sinha incubates the dream of representing Indian ethnicity in the global arena through his creations. He further aspires to reach art to the grassroots. “Art has always been confined to the rich while music has transcended all barriers. As an artist, I dream of bridging the social gap through art,” he says.