About Me

Hi I'm Jaydeep Das. Painting is my life. It has always been so. My work has been greatly influenced by my childhood, environment and upbringing. I think colour has always fascinated me and painting has been both my fantasy and escape. My paintings reflect my emotions, which have remained suppressed through my growing years. My overcautious parents were perhaps a little too protective of me. As a result I missed out on the simple joys of childhood that other children enjoy, like cycling and swimming. I sought escape in fantasy, which is today reflected in my paintings.

Since my childhood, I have been a little absent minded. While studying I would look through the window to the world outside. To this day, what I saw out of those windows remains a mystery, but I have never stopped gazing out. Something of that great unkown slipped silently into my subconscious, and speaks to me today, as I paint.

I have been free. Like the birds I paint in flight, or the angels with wings. Perhaps that is why angels are a major theme in my paintings. My quest for mental freedom is reflected in some of my paintings, such as those that show open windows looking out onto the sky and trees.

I have always loved nature, though I haven’t had much opportunity to travel, and see all her beauty. Yet, the few times I have been to hilly places, I have absorbed nature as a life giving force. So, nature is an integral part of my paintings too. Like the painting of the angel sitting by the pool surrounded by foliage.

My isolation shows up in my paintings. There is the painting of a couple sitting on a bench at the two extreme ends. The bench is a bright and vivid red, but keeps the two apart, like our experiences in life, which can be striking, but can divide us from others. Many of my paintings have a sombre reflective mood. Unconsciously I execute so much blue in my paintings . Even human figures have a blue tint, but colors modifies according to my emotions. This is clearly depicted in the painting of the lone man sitting by a window with a bottle of sprite. The bottle is rendered in photographic detail. The window too, looks out, like a dark mirror on a world sordidly real. The man, however, is painted blue. This represents the subjective experience of alienation in an increasingly impersonal world, where the objects of everyday life seem acutely real, while we remain, inside, achingly blue.

There is a conflict in my paintings between realism and interiority. Limited as we are by the real, our minds seek always to escape, to transcend. I paint the objects of everyday, then, but what I evoke through subject, mood and colour, is the inner reality of existence. A little boy floats a paper boat. The boat is his dream, his escape, and yet, it is painted in minute detail – newspaper print struggling against hope embodied. Yet the escape is’nt infinite as the boats are made of paper which cant go very far. My paintings are mired in the chasm between what we are and what we may be – thus blue man in one of my paintings, sees a winged angel in the mirror.