Of mountains and memories

Artist Lekhasri Samantsinghar was always passionate about paintings. Even as a youngster, she would find some time to sketch her natural surroundings. Her love for art blossomed during her stay in the hills few years back and now she conveys life and nature’s beauty through her artistic impressions.Depicting the state of mind of an artist, Lekhasri - also a zoology lecturer at the Ravenshaw University - has mounted 30 canvasses at her second solo exhibition titled Mountains, Memories and Momentary Madness at Cuttack. “My first solo exhibition was in Ravenshaw Art Gallery in March this year. Qualitatively both the exhibitions are different from each other. While the Ravenshaw show was more figurative, the present show is totally abstract. I have experimented with forms, lines and colours to tell my story on richly textured canvases” she says.There is one group of paintings in the exhibition which represent the state of mind of an artist. “Memories gather up like mountains and under its weight, the conscious, sub-conscious and the super-conscious mind are in a state of constant motion like madness. Yet, in these moments of madness, there are phases when things become clearer, fall into perspective. My paintings are the depiction of this seeming anarchy or disorder and the underlying order that produce such disorder,” she adds.Lekhasri says she always wanted be a painter and now, only after going through different phases in life she is beginning to realise her dream. “At a deeper level, my urge to express the complex relationships; between the conscious and the sub conscious, self and others, state of mind and matter, elements that make the earth and the organisms that crawl on it, are at the root of my creation,” she says.