Moumita’s art is an unrolling canvas of life, where in are charted, celebrated & endured the joys, pains, sorrows, agonies & aspirations, which may come in the course of day to day living. The sheer range of her work is enchanting & invigorating. And the way she explores & handles the delicate themes, & contours of emotions, is a treat to watch.

    About a year ago during one of my visits to Jaipur, I was shown some of Moumita’s works by Sangeeta Juneja, Director, Juneja Art Gallery & Artchill, who is rightly enthusiastic & supportive of Moumita’s creative endeavor. And recently during one such visit, I had a chance to view many more works by her. I was struck by her native looking, yet diligently executed paintings. If one of her work is zestful, joyous or pulsating with life, the other is subdued, pensive, & conveys sorrow or suffering. The immediacy & urgency of her work, emotively carves out an ideogram in a thoughtful manner. Reaching out to us instantly, & involving us in an ongoing dialogue with the works, viewed separately, or in a group. These works are not illustrative. They are potent & perceptive. The emotions & expressions write large on faces of her characters,( like in a novel or short story) are not without subtle nuances, they make one curious, to delve into the lines, & colors, which have been ‘portray’ them. In the art of Moumita even the weird & awkward, become winsome. She uses her lines & colors in a free flowing manner, to uphold, to toss, to jostle, to swing & to move the figures & faces, in the airiness of the space, or plants them firmly on the ground, to the wondrous effect. The beholder’s eye participates in her ‘playful act’ of communicating or suggesting something significant. Her oeuvre is not only varied, but also large. And the quantity is not without soulful outpouring.

     In her works, the colors & forms denote bruises, & wounds of our violent times, as is evident in the painting related to the violence of Nandigram. The domestic & social incidents, the balances & imbalances are also at the root of her works. She likes to move on to each, with a palette, which is vibrant & is full of fervor.

     Moumita works in pastels & acrylic, & uses pigment to enliven each segment of her works with a variance. Some of her works are inhabited by birds & animals, & she creates her own mythical world by their co-existence. Thus a female figure riding a bird, flying up above in the sky: & other figures & forms located in different sections of the painting, create many a subtexts. These sections also remind us of the popular paintings, used in calendars, & posters, based on myths & legends of gods & goddesses. Moumita gives them a new twist & turn, & uses certain elements of folk, tribal art as well. She mixes these elements elegantly in her enchanting works, & creates an altogether modern/ postmodern vocabulary of images. She puts color in contrasting manner & even her lines, delineating or joining forms, have a space for certain colors made vibrantly visible. Her blues, reds, greens are very evocative. Thus a myriad forms, & figures communicate to us jointly, & separately, both, enhancing our perception, & giving us a chance to get a feel of the color per say.

     She does not seem to settle down for a particular style, & this approach gives her an adventurous spirit to explore further, many a dark areas, as well as blissful human situations, in a manner which is always fresh & invigorating. Without invoking ‘feminism’, she manages to locate the world of ‘woman’, as she finds it today, in the family & society. In a most compelling manner, she draws our attention to the convulsive faces & figures, which seem to tell us their tales, whisper, & with a bang.

     In one of her paintings we see a female figure surrounded by blood stained hands- this is a victim from West Bengal who was not just gang raped, but also denied justice, as shown by the artist here, sitting with her back to us as if she has lost all interest in life after this double torture. A certain tussle, & tension, pervades, the picture space, like a scene on stage, when we see an enactment of some such theme.

     Moumita offers us many a glimpse from the human relationships, from contemporary events, from Nature, from the terrain of sub-conscious; & at times from the fantasies, & surreal experiences – each time, a jolt, a sensation, a sense of wonder, a throb is felt in the heart & mind of the viewer. This she manages with her medium of lines & color, assuring us that howsoever varied her method of working may seem, even ‘unsettling’ for herself, she has faith in her medium, & is fervently exploring it with newer dimensions.

Prayag Shukla

 New Delhi

Moumita Shaw, a Jamshedpur-based artist has been painting from her childhood. Daughter of a photographer and documentary film-maker, she grew up surrounded by an ambience of books, film and art. Jamshedpur, with its cultural apparatuses and industrial landscape, helped her find her creative voice and influence her quirky, gritty and urban style. An exciting and prolific emerging artist, her collections are scattered around the globe. Married to a fellow artist, her home is her studio.

 Moumita's oeuvre describes her various intense preoccupations — works that explore ominous terrains, celebrate or mourn spectacular tableaux. Bravely post-modernist in depicting relationships, her figures — human, non-human and animal — are arrested at a moment of supreme consciousness. She is also an unapologetically personal storyteller of reality, hyper reality and fantasy. Interestingly, every work has multiple elements. But these are stories that coexist or interlock, just like simultaneous strands of life. So, what could have been a fragmented, dislocated vision becomes instead a slice from life's composite mosaic. Backgrounds are layered and textured. "Because my work has a poster quality about it, I wanted to break the flat, glossy tonal monotony of poster backgrounds," says the artist.

She is a rule-breaker, but not for the sake of it. Acrylics may dominate, but on paper she experiments with diverse media: watercolors, pastels, conte`. For this collection, she has used threads innovatively to tie multiple elements or heighten an element's piercing effect. She uses photographs and paper scraps for collage. Her spaces multi-task with panels and compartments and spill over boundaries. Certain paintings have the quality of sculpture and installation art suspended in space. As Moumita explores bigger canvasses today, she navigates through wider social commitments and socio-political references.          

For Moumita, the human face communicates life's told and untold experiences, infected with sacred and profane emotions. So eyes, lips and even the way she treats their skin become infused with meaning. "Even their silences are not voiceless," she says. At times she cakes the faces with opaque color or streaks them. In their 'make-up', the faces reveal a gamut of emotions. Some faces, like the clown's, defy iconographic conventions. "I enjoy iconographic subversions. My clowns can be sinister or sad to make a powerful social commentary," she explains.

Moumita also revels in her full, voluptuous female figures — she finds interesting possibilities in the female form that can be sexual as well as maternal. The human form's dramatic potential excites her: faces, limbs, and their proportions are made to stretch their inherent dramatic possibilities, either in collectivity or seclusion. Their garments and accessories become either their extensions or deliberately provocative foreign elements. Sometimes even landscape elements, like trees, resemble human beings in conversation. To push more such boundaries, she tries to find "life in still life" — vases, for instance, are a recurring motif, but they are alive through their distortions. Through animals, Moumita creates her own myths, some pre-historic, some contemporary, but all telling their own stories. Her evolution from a self-reflexive, self-contained multiple monologue into a searching, searing dialogue with the world outside reflects in her to-and-fro journeys between the personal and the public: topical images from television, newspapers or urbanscapes recur as a personal commentary of the issues that affect her. Through figures, objects and signs, she puts forth her signature observations to a public event that may have disturbed or angered her. "No sensitive person can remain immune from the world. Through my work, the political becomes personal," she states with conviction.  

As far as colors go, Moumita likes the unexpected. "Investing colors, yes, but I also like rediscovering familiar colors by using them differently. I like to break the mould," she says impishly. Red as a color intrigues her, but the reason is as yet an enigma for her as red for her does not always mean violence. Her creative process reveals her intensely personal nature of journeys. "Sometimes, I may plan a painting in my sketchbook. But sometimes, it's straight on the canvas. I start with a germ of an idea or a half-remembered dream and follow where it leads me in frenzy. Then its over," she says with disarming candour.

This collection provides an intimate glimpse of an artist's tempestuous and tireless journey.

Sulagana Biswas

August 2008

Kolkata