The idols are huge when they go into the sea. Some are taller than a house. A whole city walks them to the water with drums and colour. Then the city lets them go.
What comes back is smaller. A hand. Part of a face. A crown with nothing under it. For days after visarjan, pieces of gods lie on the sand and soften in the tide.
This September, Aniket filmed one of them on the wet sand. It is where his paintings begin. The idols are huge, he says. “During visarjan they fall and break.”
Aniket did his BFA in Drawing and Painting at Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, which was founded in 1857. He has stayed on for his MFA in Painting. The training there is classical: portraits, composition and long days of painting outdoors. He is grateful for it. But what drives him most is the act of painting itself.
“The process of my work is more important, enjoyable and fascinating than any other concept, thought or idea,” he says.
No plan first
He paints in oil, layer by layer. He does not draw a plan first. His paintings begin as a response to what he has lived through that week. “The daily experiences became the sketch,” he says, “and I painted it.”
One of those paintings is six and a half feet tall. It does not hang straight. It is called Khandit. The word means broken. Aniket bent the canvas so the whole picture leans out from the wall, as if it is about to fall.
Two faiths, one home
The question behind his work began at home. Aniket grew up in a Hindu family. After a very hard time in the family’s life, his mother came to believe in Jesus Christ. She found peace in it. His father does not share her belief. “Yet they coexist,” Aniket says, “and today there is peace in our home.”
Our Home is his painting about that house. It is three canvases that make one picture. Some of its forms stand for his mother and his father, their work and their beliefs. He paints himself there too, asleep in the middle panel.
He named another painting Peace, though it shows both war and peace. Doves fly through it. Two figures attack each other. They could be anyone. “In the end, we all belong to the same race,” he writes. “That is enough.”
This year his work won the Government First Award, a gold medal, at the school’s annual show. It also won the Shri Gopal Adivarekar Award. He showed at the 46th Monsoon Show at Jehangir Art Gallery. A large new painting is already on his easel.
Read Issue One, with all eight films →
More about Aniket, and Aniket’s works in the catalogue →
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