Goutam Khamaru

Born

Education
He completed his Bachelors in Painting from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and Masters from a UP govt. recognized university.

Exhibition
He has shown at various galleries like CIMA, Aakriti, Birla Academy of Art and culture, Academy of Fine Arts, etc.
Goutam comes from a semi rural background of West Bengal, where growing up in the midst of farm animals and nature is common. His paintings are emphatically about farm animals of the typical Indian village – cows, goats,owls, etc.; and in that sense, he is an honest and genuine artist, because he doesn’t pretend to glamorize his work by painting charging sleek horses or muscular and brutish Spanish bulls, which might appear somewhat artificial. In fact he’s so familiar with cows and goats, having had them in his own courtyard, growing up, that he has internalized them to the extent of almost humanizing them. He plays with their forms by starting with random shapeless shapes; a process he says he accidentally came upon one day, while pelting the farm walls with wet cow dung, that splattered on the walls, creating shapes in which he could discern emerging familiar forms of his beloved animals, much in the way some of us see faces and dinosaurs in cloud formations. Thenceforward he has created his paintings which are rather unique, quite different from within the algorithm of the animal painting genre, subsequently, naive and colourful like child art; and hence with an innate strength and liveliness. Something that every artist strives for secretly – creating childlike guileless artworks. Goutam’s animal paintings with their colourful acrobatic distortions stop just short of being decorative, while increasing effortlessly the innate organic movement patterns of each animal type.