The Open Studio / Tarun Butta
Tarun Butta
Feel Like a Tree
Roots that might be limbs, limbs that might be roots
Ochre light runs down the trunks like warm skin.
A root bends at the elbow. A branch opens like a hand.
In the left corner indigo pools like rain in old stone.
Thin strokes lie over each other, fine as hair on bark.
Low on the right a face rests in the grain, half there.
You lean in and the wood leans back.
The work
Tarun Butta trained at Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University and is based in Gurgaon. Feel Like a Tree is a large acrylic painting on canvas, 183 × 152 cm. Pale trunks and roots twist up the canvas. Some of them turn into bodies and a quiet face. Butta builds the image in thin layers of paint and fine strokes so that one form shows through another. Butta writes that trees and ruins are "not metaphors but interlocutors". Here the tree is someone to meet.
In the artist’s words
“I am drawn to that threshold where decay and renewal blur, where silence takes on volume. Trees, ruins, fungi and architectures are no longer symbols but intelligences. They are not metaphors but interlocutors. The self is not a container but a passage into the metaphysical. Layers of paint, strokes and marks weave dimension through translucency.”
- Theme
- Body becoming tree
- Material
- Acrylic on canvas
- Size
- 183 × 152 cm
- Year
- 2026
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University
- From
- Gurgaon
- Code
- RC-3956
