Soumitra Chatterji

Born

Education
He completed his bachelor’s in graphic arts and Master’s in History of Art from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and from there straight on to Nainital to join as Art teacher of the famous Sherwood College. From there he moved to Dehradun for a few more years.

Exhibition
Soumitra Chatterji is one of those people who have been blessed with the luck of the artist – that of living in the midst of nature; i.e., for most of his life. After spending his initial years of growing up in Hazaribagh, he went to Santiniketan to study Fine Arts, another idyllic place with its own kind of beauty with red earth and lots of palm trees and picturesquely changing seasons.
Soumitra spent most of his working life in in the cool hills of northern India, and much of his work reflects their beautiful moist coolness. He has shown solo in Art Heritage gallery, Delhi and in group shows in the Birla Academy of Fine Art and Crafts, Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, Gallery Katayun, and others.
Most artists like to paint landscapes; and that includes cityscapes, seascapes, mountainscapes, rural landscapes and abstract landscapes. Perhaps manyartists feel that painting landscapes is an easy and non-committal affair – for they make no statement, political or existential – and of course they sell much better than any other genres of painting or drawing. But making a landscape speak to the viewer, and more importantly, feel within its limited confines of paper or canvas, what the artist saw and felt in the midst of its actual vastness and palpable presence, is quite another level of greatness to be achieved. And that, is what Soumitra has achieved every time, in his different landscapes of the vast mountains of the north, various water-bodies, or the humble wilderness of his backyard. He has breathed a life into them, as though he had lived within the painting when he was working on it; which, at the cost of sounding cliched, or even over the top, but true to this viewer, is something akin to divine, a feeling that a being in the midst of a sublimely beautiful landscape evokes within us. They are guilelessly unpretentious and realistic, but with that something extra, the oomph or the X factor, one might call it; but that was added effortlessly from the deep love that the artist has felt amongst these landscapes that have been home to him for most of his life, and have become part of the air he breathes.