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Gopal Samantray Born in the village of Adhanga (district KendraPara) in Orissa in 1976, he is among those artists who have emerged with a distinct identity of their own in the last few years. From the visual perspective he has an uncanny grasp of the pictorial language. The viewer need not enter into an unnecessary intellectual struggle. The message is quite simple but the texture Gopa lSamantray has achieved after a long struggle and immense patience complicates the seemingly simple message, albeit quite effortlessly. The artist did not come upon this texture all of a sudden. At a time when his means were limited, there was hardly any money to buy a canvas; the almost ‘wayward’ use of colours was a luxury, at that time this young artist found his way through the maze of colours on paper itself. Gopal recalls with a smile the days when a fellow artist heard noises of horror in this texture. This created doubts in Gopal but it’s the destiny of a true artist to continually explore the paths of courage. One recalls a short but deeply meaningful comment by Rabindranath Tagore: “What is art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of real.” Gopal does not come from a family that would persuade one in childhood or youth to take to painting fearlessly. His early childhood memories are replete with snatches of Durga Puja. He would be left speechless wondering how a man could create such a beautiful image. Village schools at the time did not have a formal art teacher. The one teaching literature would also somehow manage to teach art. Impressed by Gopal’s facility to draw, such teachers would ask him to show his classmates how a drawing was made. Remarkably, this artist had to make drawings at home quite secretively, lest anyone should notice that the child was going adrift. The family wanted him to concentrate on his studies. Gopal in any case was unaware of the meaning or significance of art. Once he had passed the high school, his elder brother wanted him to go for automobile engineering. His father was a section officer in the Public Works Department. But in the middle of this totally anti-art climate at home, Gopal was keen to go for another form of engineering – engineering of the soul. Interestingly, today Gopal’s works are to be found at the exhibitions organized by luxury automobile brands such as BMW and Audi. That’s the paradox of our age. It’s been a long struggle for Gopal coming up with his very own pictorial language. Before completing seven years of studies at the B K College of Art in Bhubaneswar, he had to spend time in remote jungles. It so happened that following the wishes of his family, he spent the years 1994-96 in Hyderabad doing a technical course in telephony. This was followed by a job at Orissa where postings at Kalahandi, Balangir and Koraput proved decisive for Gopal’s creative urges. There were dense forests, many areas were in the grip of famine, and Naxalite ideas were popular in the region. Even today Gopal remembers those electrifying moments when he was staying in a tiny village and sighted a wild bear across the window. Even on the TV Gopal never watched all those popular films. For him the real Wonderland was the world of ‘Discovery’ and ‘National Geographic’ channels. Around this time, seeing Gopal’s talent a distant relative suggested he should join an art college. The current wisdom was that it was difficult to make ends meet on the strength of art education. But for him this was a turning point. He took a Bachelor’s degree in art in 2002 followed by a Master’s in 2004. Nevertheless, a long struggle lay ahead. In 2005 he moved to Mumbai, painting sets for popular TV serials among other jobs. Two years later he came down to Delhi, working as a studio assistant for quite some time. But it was a fertile ground for learning things. The strong and imaginative texture Gopal has achieved today is the result of a diversity of experiments with colours. The creation of this texture even involved a variety of experiments with tea leaves. Gopal does not speak the complex language of intellectualism or conceptualism but the colours and forms which he has arrived at after tough experiences and practice betray an uncanny ‘local intelligence’. Gopal’s world has no time for abstraction and where a man or a woman do exist they are there as images in the mediums of stone or metal. The images which have achieved the status of museum icons do haunt him – if Michelangelo’s ‘David’ of Florence Museum, ‘Venus’ of Louvre, ‘DidarganjYakshi’ of Patna Museum, or the mysterious ‘Shalbhanjika’ of Gwalior do enter his paintings, they create quite another world in the middle of nature, birds and wild animals. Tigers, zebras, elephants, gorillas or kite- or eagle-like birds are integral to Gopal’s world. The Bengal tiger and the zebra especially inspire him a lot. The zebra has remained the favourite animal of artists worldwide. Its visual appeal is universal. But the particular metropolis where Gopal finds these animals standing, there the balanced and imaginative use of colours and texture attributes to his canvases a pictorial vocabulary complete in itself. For example when he turns clay flowerpots into steel ones, his technical prowess gives astonishing results. When he places a cheetah on a velvety sofa, the viewer is haunted by the image for long. Quite often it’s the streetlights not the trees which lend an atmosphere in his works. Many a time Gopal gets disturbed by the facts which qualify for ‘bad news in the media. For example he learnt through the Facebook that in Africa 30,000 gorillas were killed every year thanks to the expansion of the timber trade. That’s how the gorilla found a place in his canvases. We all realise that ultimately an artist does not find success though any ‘subject’ or through portraying inconvenient issues. His last frontier is his pictorial language and Gopal Samantray has been continually and courageously experimenting on this frontier. The fact is that a true artist’s creative urge really is to draw a painting not a poster. By vinod bhardwaj (eminent critic of art and film)