Date:20/01/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/01/20/stories/2008012060201000.htm

National

Satyajit Ray’s drawings on display

Staff Reporter

Kolkata: A series of vibrant sketches, highlighting filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s virtuosity with the paintbrush, is the crux of the exhibition, the ‘Art of Satyajit Ray,’ inaugurated by West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi here on Saturday. “Ray was first an artist and then a filmmaker,” said Sandip Ray, his son, a filmmaker himself. While several exhibitions had focussed on his photography and films, this one organised by the Ray Society at the Academy of Fine Arts was exclusively devoted to his drawings and illustrations, Mr. Sandip Ray said.

Ray had joined the Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan to study art, and later D.J. Keymer, an advertising firm in Kolkata, as an artist and visualiser.The commercial illustrations he devised during 1940s and 1950s for products ranging from cigarettes to hair oil, are displayed in the exhibition, their brilliance enhanced by Ray’s masterful use of calligraphy.

Also displayed are some of the stunning book jackets he designed for the publishing house Signet Press, the un-filmed but quaintly illustrated title cards for his film ‘Joi Baba Felunath’, a detailed outdoor shooting schedule for ‘Sonar Kella’. .