‘Forms Within’ by Soumitra Chatterjee
“Forms Within,” by Soumitra Chatterjee — a collection of more than 100 artworks by the renowned actor, playwright, author, poet, elocutionist, and now an artist — is a journey in itself. It’s a journey of the artist in the world that surrounds him, all the theatrics of it.
Soumitra Chatterjee, with his finer skills and an intuitive mind, had been practicing sketches all his life, and of course, his acting career. These artworks that he once drew are churned out of that journey in the world of theatrics. He wrote about how noticing the human faces, their expressions, have been especially crucial to his job. “I have had to create sketches and drawings, as part of my cinematic and theatrical work at times. They have been a result of stage-design, make-up planning, and other similar situation-driven needs.”
This knack in sketching the characters, the expressions, the clothes might have been the oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray’s influence on the artist, whom he closely worked with. Ray was a brilliant illustrator who would always prefer to draw his shots for storyboarding. Chatterjee’s diary arts and illustrations were also majorly inspired by the artworks of Rabindranath Tagore, which the noble laureate transformed from his discarded literature, as though the soul of those rejected words were still there in the art that was made out of them. Not much unlike Tagore’s artworks, Chatterjee’s sketches and drawings were transformed out of discarded words of him.
The artist was genuinely modest when he wrote, “These illustrations can hardly be called art; they are at best, amateurish attempts to assist me in my professional ventures,” in the book, talking about his journey in the realms of art. He trained himself to do just that by sketching people around him in places he has been to, despite having no formal training in painting or artistry.
These sketches make up for a tall tale of how an artist perceived the world around him, and how it inspired him to emulate those worldly emotions through his art. Showcasing that vision of the world is what the book attempted to do and it did achieve that goal, even better, it built on it.
The artworks and the plates printed in the book are based on Soumitra Chatterjee’s one and the only exhibition of art where ‘Forms Within’ was first released.
There are more than a hundred plates.
‘Forms Within’ by Soumitra Chatterjee
Publication Year — 2013
About the Book — Soft Cover, More than 100 Colour Paintings
