Paresh Maity's journey from small town Bengal to homes of rich and famous

The artist says he followed a regimen that included painting something every single day of his life

It was actually samosas,” artist Paresh Maity tells me in a soft, Bengali-accented tone, recalling his motivation to attend a sit-and-draw painting contest at a local municipal hall when he was still in seventh grade at Hamilton High School. It wasn’t cash or honours, it was the free snacks that got the attention of a hungry boy. But the thing was, he had competition. Because 199 other students also threw their hats in the ring and when their work went on display, Maity flatly says, he was shocked. “My painting was the worst of them all.” He became a laughing stock among friends. “It was a turning point, and I decided I would be the best when I paint the next time,” he says. Between then and college, he ran way from home, went to Delhi for a couple months, hit the hippie trail, lived with craftsmen on what was almost skid row before returning to Kolkata. 

Later, he went on to study art at the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata honing his skills on what he had seen during his childhood: serene rivers, lush green fields, boatmen and skies set ablaze with the sun and its reflection. Forty years later, Maity is one of the best-known modern artists nationwide with works featured across most major landmarks and part of the collections of the rich and famous. 

We’ve settled in at Thai Pavilion, Taj Vivanta, a downtown favourite among lawyers, corporates and everyone who lives in south Mumbai, to find out how that journey progressed. 

Maity, a shy, spectacled middle-aged man, is wearing a beret, electric blue pants and a navy jacket. Over his T-shirt he's draped a signature silver necklace, a crudely fashioned medallion with a lion engraved on it, picked up off the street. As one of six children of a government clerk, Maity neither had a parental role model nor inspiration for his chosen vocation. On the contrary, it was rebellion against a paternal push to become an engineer or a doctor that led him to flee home to follow his heart — to create images nurtured while watching idol-makers in Tamluk at work during festive seasons.

Our waiter arrives and we pick vegetarian pad thai noodles along with stir fried Thai vegetables and a red Thai chicken curry that Maity selects after quizzing the waiter on whether it’s more fiery than the green version. He is told green is spicier. At weddings he is asked to pose for selfies and in Kolkata, real estate companies feature billboards and hoardings with him. Does Maity, whose father wouldn't let him step out of the house after 5 pm, ever wonder how he made the leap to fame and fortune? 

The truth is, Maity says, he doesn't think about it but that the early years were so harsh he can't escape their influence. He actually forged his father's signature to fill out an admission form to go to art college, and when he was accepted he travelled some 200 km every day to the campus and back. “Eight hours on the road every day was like living theatre, and in six years, I was never absent for a single day.” When in college often ate jhaal moori or puffed rice with condiments for lunch.

While his prowess as a water colourist speaks for itself, some events fell in place to catapult him to fame. The first one was before solo auctions, when he stayed as a paying guest (for Rs 800 a month) in the corridor of a Parsi home belonging to two sisters in Kolkata’s Bow Bazaar area. He learned discipline as well as speaking a little Parsi and became friends with journalist CR Irani, who later became editor of The Statesman and would also camp there from time to time. In 1982 he sold three water colours — 20 inches by 30 inches — to a gallery opposite the Park Hotel in Kolkata for Rs 75 each. Then in the late 80's, journalist Pritish Nandy did a cover story for the Illustrated Weekly, which featured him sitting on a boat in a river. “That did a lot for me and the whole art scene,” Maity says. 

After that, Tina Ambani’s Harmony Art Foundation which created a platform for artists and organised exhibitions frequently also gave Maity a platform that allowed him to showcase his works before an audience with deep pockets. Today, Maity’s water colours, 20 inches by 30 inches, go for Rs 7-8 lakh each. 

He’s even displayed at public landmarks: an 800-foot painting at the T-3 terminal at New Delhi Airport, a nine-foot water colour at St. Regis Hotel in Mumbai, another at the Taj Santa Cruz, more in Cecil hotel in Simla, the Oberoi Hotel in Bengaluru, the Oberoi Raj Vilas in Jaipur, and several more across the Leela hotels in Chennai, New Delhi and Bengaluru. Visit any prominent business leader’s home and there’s a Maity on display. In part that’s because his work is easy to find. The second is that his themes are safe, generally understood by most, which means it's easier to appreciate. 

The perception then would be that Maity is also an unabashed marketing machine. “I’m no fancy showman. In fact, I’m happy sitting on the floor and eating, and am very conscious that I am from a very poor and underprivileged background, and I am okay to be that way until the end,” he says. He’s not lying. He had no electricity at home till he was 19. Which is why the kerosene lantern features in so many of his works. “I owned one pair of trousers, and would wash them when I returned at night and dried them and wore them again the next morning.” Be that as it may, Maity knows he’s arrived but stays rooted by returning home every so often. “I visit Tamluk 10 times a year.” His mother and siblings still live there.

Our lunch arrives, fragrant and as colorful as one of Maity's landscapes. We settle into the fare, which tastes as good as it looks. “How’s the red curry”, I ask, and get a “glorious” from Maity, who uses that word a lot. The noodles and vegetables are on the mark, and we settle into a long silence as we eat. For someone as prolific as he is — 80 solo exhibitions — it’s surprising that there isn’t a massive team backing Maity up. “I have no secretary, no team, no marketing, no administration — all of that is done by my galleries,” he says. Those include CIMA in Kolkata, Sumukha in Bengaluru, Art Alive in Delhi, and the Institute of Contemporary Indian Art Gallery in Mumbai. 

Some critics say Maity’s work is limited to two broad styles that range between tranquil but lavish landscapes and cubist images of men and women almost always in opulent reds, yellows and blues, and is devoid of other styles that include, pointillism, impressionism, or figures. To that Maity says his style “is what it is”. By his own admission, his major influences have been the colours of Rajasthan, Picasso’s cubism, and English painters JMW Turner and John Constable’s landscapes. He acknowledges his Indian brethren referring to the “deeply respected Paritosh Sen”, and the “brilliant abstract minimalism of Jagdish Swaminathan”. However, one may say he's still on his way to joining that hallowed trio of Indian art rock stars: MF Husain, VS Gaitonde and SH Raza. Of course, they’re also all dead and Maity is still relatively young, with at least a decade or two of work still left in him. He’s already toyed with different styles — work in monochrome, a rendition of Gandhi’s Salt March and so on. Water colours are no easy medium either, there's no second chance with fixed areas if you go wrong, which is not true of oils or pastels. Even so, Maity tells me, he's looking at producing an entirely different collection. 

Our plates are empty and we’ve both done justice to our meal. Is there room for dessert, a waiter asks. Maity says he would like to try the water chestnuts in coconut milk only if there is no sugar in it but it is premixed so we skip it. 

In September last year he went to Guilin in southern China, where he spent a few weeks in the countryside, watching ducks in rivers and absorbing the “mystical quality of that part of the world”. The works from that trip will be minimalist and it is clearly a leap he knows he has to make. As when Raza found expression in the cosmic Bindu, he simply stopped doing the expressionist landscapes that he had done for years. Or when Husain moved on from horses to other subjects. Like the exact moment a stock market shifts, it's not a time one can predict but knows when it's happening. Until then, Maity says, “I will remain unhappy inside because of a constant quest to create something I haven’t been able to do yet”. That may well be the driving force that has, and will keep him going.