Shantala Palat     Artist  And Dreamer

Shantala Palat

 

Shantala Palat is a Delhi based, new generation contemporary artist whose work has recently gained popularity after participating in series of international and national exhibitions and winning the prestigious Nippon art award (2011) from School of Art Institute of Chicago, USA. In 2013, she had her first solo exhibition at Hamra Centre, City of West Torrens Auditorium Gallery, Adelaide, Australia. Shantala’s artworks were appreciated for their vibrant and vivid colours and the interesting ability to beautify the negative and positive spaces of the interlocked figures and for portraying the curious nature of the modern human being.

 

Shantala Palat’s paintings fascinate the art lovers across the world for the use of simple symmetry to create unusual and fantastical creatures such as birds or elephants that finally transforms into a modern man trapped in various social situations. As the images emerged, strange personalities overtook each one of them. The process was planned with months of preparatory sketches prior to the painting and the results were magical and intriguing even to the artist herself.

 

The main theme in Shantala’s paintings is about the everchanging shades of our personality and what it does to us.  Human nature is a curious creation. It waxes, wanes & erupts. It is fleeting and yet endearing. It is our eternal makeup for a lifetime.

 

Shantala’s artwork uses water-based media like acrylics, gouache, watercolour and colour pencils to enhance the bright and colourful palette of the works, as if animating life on paper.

 

Artist's Voice: "My work draws inspiration from nature, composite animal paintings of the Indian Mughal miniatures and childhood animation films My Little Pony and the Walt Disney productions. I am interested in combining the formal qualities of composition with the spontaneity and freshness of first impressions. Thus, elements of nature such as water provide a rich repertoire of experiences ranging from the meditative to the visual while the bright hues, shapes and colour of the animation series evoke a certain memory or moment in time. The experience is often a sense of unexpected pathos or as it was, a blast from the past. "