Shweta P Raina

Born

Education
She Completed both her Master’s and Bachelor’s in Printmakingfrom Kala Bhavana, Santininiketan.

Exhibition
Amongst her other accomplishments, Shweta’s career graph shows a considerable time spent educating children in various ways – as a school teacher, through workshops, and other interactive ways. She has also participated in various prestigious group shows in India and abroad; to name a few – AIFACS exhibitions, National exhibition, Saga Art College, Japan, India Habitat Centre, as well as participated in graphics workshops at a national level. She was awarded the AIFACS award in Graphic Arts in 2002.

Shweta comes from an ever moving army background. For a sensitive soul, this kind of constant uprooting of life and starting all over again in a different place with a different set of friends, school, neighbourhood, landscape, et al, can create intense emotional trauma, especially in the childhood days when one’s best friend is more precious than anything or anyone else in the universe. It is a conjecture on this author’s part, but, repeated over time, this discomfort and pain of physical and emotional upheavals becomes much too familiar and deadens and forms a layer of tough shiny patina of cheerfulness, as it has in Shweta. But as she claims, her works carry in them a mixture of humour, drama and darkness, elements that are mainstay of people scarred by pain of parting repeatedly in life; and, being a creative person, she has, in her imagination, dramatized every little happening of significance in her life, that with age has learned to recognize itself and accept itself with a pinch of humour. But maturing into adulthood, Shweta has taken life in her stride and every experience that she has had, she assimilated within herself and learned to look at them as enriching experiences of life. For an artist these serve as a fountainhead of imagery for a lifetime, combined with the constantly changing perspectives on life.

Outwardly a gregarious person, Shweta’s work reflects her dark and sunny side simultaneouly, appearing in layers as it is processed in the graphics medium; ironically, Shweta’s uncounsciously natural choice of medium during her studies in Kala Bhavana, which deals in working in layers, and in various methods.

Like scars, pain never really goes away, and in Shweta’s work it has lent its own doze of darkness. There is no self respecting truthful artist, who doesn’t unabashedly shows all in their work – the pain, the pretense to cover it with humour or romance or physical beauty. It has remained in her work, as is apparent in the solitary figures in much of her work. Layering has become a part of her persona, as though creating curtains from behind which the protagonist emerges, as out of darkness. Presently Shweta when she doesn’t work in the graphic medium, creates works using different objects that she pastes and incorporates into her compositions, creating layers of enigmatical narratives, often inward looking and autobiographical, using various objects like different papers, old worn books, painting, paper pulp, and other things, to build up her images.