Painting by knife's edge

Nupur Kundu is as excited by textures as she is by colour

Colours dance across her canvases. If there is a harmony in the abstract idea of her paintings, it must owe a lot to the kathak she has learnt since she was a child.

Nupur Kundu is effervescent, like her paintings, an earlier play of colours now less ecstatic "" restricted to blacks and whites and a metallic fusion in copper and gold. "It is," she concedes, "a reflection of my personality."

The young painter (she was born in 1975) follows a long line of abstractionists, but there is the faintest suggestion of Ram Kumar in her arrangements that hint at landscapes and cityscapes as he might have visualised them.

But where Ram Kumar's colours are iridiscent, hers are reined in by an earthiness that is at once at odds with the playful use of material and its application.

For even though Nupur paints compulsively (and like most artists, on a number of canvases simultaneously, thereby creating a series of ideas, each interlinked with the other): "The little bit of incompleteness in one gives seed to a new painting," she says of the links between her work.

Her chosen idiom is impasto, in which oil pigments are applied thickly with the help of a palette knife, nails, sculpting tools, even a nail-file.

"Thick layers of colour excite me," she says. Equally, it's faster to apply, "making it more spontaneous", she admits. But oil takes time to dry "" another reason she chooses to work on a number of canvases at the same time.

An "intuitive" artist, she believes she's influenced, to some extent, by nature and the outdoors. "I like to play around with the canvas as a dramatic space," she says.

Nupur lets ideas flow (and float) before letting each painting develop its own consciousness. "Each work is very true to an expression or mood "" it's very performance-based work."

Even though she's abandoned the suffusion of colour that characterised her early work, she believes it retains elements of nature, and each painting is an extension of her own persona. "It's finding myself," she says.

"Painting is a self-indulgent profession where one is constantly discovering oneself. It's a true form of catharsis." That's another reason why, unlike a lot of her peers in the profession, she steers clear of issue-based paintings. "Comment on an issue and the work becomes a poster," she says caustically.

According to Art Alive gallerist and curator Sunaina Anand, "Nupur's works have been bought by serious collectors. The response to her work has been good. A level of maturity is being reached as the series is moving ahead."

A clearer reflection of this are her prices that have been seeing a growth of up to 40 per cent since 2003. "For a young artist like her, the escalation has been very good," says Anand.

Nupur "" who is currently working to put together a forthcoming exhibition jointly with her husband Subrotu Kundu, at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, in November "" says it's a good time for young artists, with corporate houses wanting to invest in their works.

"Today's young artists are the masters of the future, and people are realising that," she says.