Features, cover stories, columns and quiet visits — the writing that surrounds the paintings.
An artist's relationship with the world often shows in what they choose to paint. For Kanak Chanpa Chakma, that relationship runs through people, cultural memory and the landscapes of the Hill Tracts. Her canvases hold indigenous life, women's experience and the natural world. Beyond the studio, another side of her life speaks just as clearly: her devotion to the care of animals.
In 1971, a four year old boy, Mohammad Iqbal, watched a war reduce his world to dust. Decades later, in a newspaper, he saw the same suffering on a different land, and the memory came rushing back. Today, the faces of children on his canvases look out at us with silent, steady eyes. There is no scream in them. Yet the whole world’s grief gathers there.
A life in art is rarely measured by success alone. It is shaped by discipline, memory, loss, observation, and the courage to begin again. For Ranjit Das, becoming an artist has been a lifelong process of learning and unlearning. From his rigorous years in Baroda under K. G. Subramanyan to the memories of war, the attic room of Shakhari Bazar, and the quiet act of observing the world from above, each experience has contributed to his visual language. Perhaps the true measure of his journey lies not in the balance sheet of success, but in the accumulation of seeing.
A visit to Jamal Uddin Ahmed’s studio offers more than an opportunity to view paintings. Explore the artist’s working process, personal history, lifelong friendships, and the quiet rhythms of everyday life that shape his practice. Through decades of artworks, cherished memories, and the atmosphere of his Elephant Road studio, the visit becomes a journey into the world behind the canvas.
A conversation with Ratneswar Sutradhar about lilies, Pixel Error, fatherhood, the haor, and the quiet world that shapes one of Bangladesh's most distinctive contemporary artists…
