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Following is an excerpt from a news report in the Telegraph.

Painter Jatin Das’s dream of a museum for traditional and contemporary art in his native Orissa has gone international.

Das was in Washington and New York last week outlining his plans for the J.D. Centre of Art in Bhubaneswar to his American and Indian American fans.

At an interactive evening at the Indian embassy here, hosted by India’s deputy chief of mission Raminder Singh Jassal, with slides of his life’s work, Das said the proposed centre would be the first in India to display both traditional and contemporary art in 14 permanent galleries under one roof.

The Orissa government has allotted an acre of land to the painter, who was born in Mayurbhanj. B.V. Doshi, the famous architect from Ahmedabad and associate of Le Corbusier, has designed the master plan for the ambitious centre.

The painter said he had been dreaming of the project for almost a decade and expected that it would cost Rs 50 crore to make it a reality.

“I have been funding the centre, which has a board and a small staff of six people, with money from my paintings. They are temporarily working out of a house in Bhubaneswar given by the state government,” Das told this correspondent.

But he plans to make international requests for funding and hopes Indian Americans will join in the effort.

When the centre is ready, Das will donate his entire collection of 45 years, including paintings, books and antiquities, to the new venture to be housed in one place.

Some of the art can be seen in the pages: [8],[9],[10],[11] and [12].

Following is what a Telegraph report says about them.

The exhibition of artists from Orissa titled Dimensions & Directions that has opened at Mon Art Gallerie is a refreshing change from the cliched works displayed over and over again at most city galleries nowadays.

To begin with, these young artists have a more heightened awareness of the political situation in the state and also of the degradation of environment as the direct fallout of some political decisions. Some of the works may seem a trifle crude but nobody can doubt their effectiveness despite that shortcoming.

In Debarchan Rout’s canvas a man on a scaffolding is painting a wall green, while ironically greenery has been erased from the terrain beneath him in the name of development. The world map has turned into a black umbrella stopping acid rain from destroying a sapling in Rajiblochan Pani’s canvas.

Traders would once set out from Bali from the Orissa coast, but now the rivers have turned dry and sand is carted away from it. Huge factories come up in background. The entire scene in this work by Sovan Kumar is painted on a piece of tarpaulin.

Birendra Pani once again focuses on the young cross-dressing dancers of Orissa, this time folk style. In Rohit Supakar’s painting, a brand new car emerges from the trunk of an anthropomorphic tree, in an obvious reference to the resistance put up by local people against forcible appropriation of farmland by the government.

In Ramakrishna Behera’s wide-angle paintings of Ladakh, the dividing line between fact and fancy melt away. It must be mentioned that however well intentioned the installation on Ridley turtles may have been it ended up looking too obvious.

 

New Indian Express has a report on this. Following is an excerpt.

Arun’s paper sculptures are flying off the walls thick and fast ever since he put them up at the Orissa Modern Art Gallery here. …