KALYANI JHA | NT BUZZ
Relationships, ambition, spirituality, music, memory, change and the everyday experiences that quietly shape a life, all find their way into Bismarck Dias’s work. In his solo exhibition, ‘Between Chapters: A Goan Artist Looks Back, Moves Forward’, the Goan artist brings together paintings and drawings that reflect the moments, questions and observations gathered along his journey through life and as an artist.
Dias graduated in applied arts and advertising from Goa College of Art in 1983. He went on to work as an art director and creative director in Mumbai and Dubai, with agencies including Ogilvy & Mather, Lintas, Trikaya Grey and Bates PanGulf. His work included campaigns for brands such as Thums Up, Cadbury’s 5 Star, Castrol, Park Avenue and Sony Gulf, as well as collaborations in Milan, Paris, Cape Town, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
Alongside his advertising career, Dias continued to draw. His work with publishing houses eventually led him towards painting. His practice spans acrylic and oil on canvas, pen and ink on paper, and ballpoint pen with acrylic ink.
His paintings draw on personal experiences, spirituality and everyday observations. In ‘Conscious Life’, a clothesline clip represents the balance between holding on to a relationship and giving the other person room to grow. Dias says ordinary objects can provide ideas for his work. He says, “A clothes hanging clip can spark an idea and set my imagination in motion.”
‘Crossroads’ grew out of a period when Dias was reluctant to commit because he feared losing his freedom. He first expressed his conflicting feelings in a sketch, which later developed into the painting. By the time he completed it, he says, he had resolved those feelings. Two other works explore spiritual themes. ‘Liberado’ deals with leaving things behind, while ‘Spiritual Science’ draws on the Hindu concepts of creation, preservation and destruction.
Goan life and storytelling feature in works such as ‘The Sailor’s Lady’, based on a Goan tale of love, longing and choices set in the 1980s, and ‘The Goan Poetry’, which reflects Dias’s fondness for village life.
He also pays tribute to musicians through a series of drawings featuring Miles Davis, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Anoushka Shankar, Ustad Zakir Hussain, Chris Perry and Remo Fernandes. Dias says jazz has taught him to be receptive to new ideas and experiment with different approaches. Dias explores his experiences in the advertising world through ‘Egonomics’. “It’s failure that teaches you more than success. How success makes you over-confident and how Ego sets in and brings you down to earth. Experiencing the corporate world made me think of symbols like steps, graphs, etc. So I sketched the thought and ‘Egonomics’ came to life,” he says.
He handles several stages of making a painting himself, from developing an idea and sketching to choosing a colour palette and stretching the canvas. He prefers trying new things to sticking to what he already knows. The Johnnie Walker slogan, “Keep Walking”, sums up his outlook on life.
Dias hopes viewers will enjoy his work and connect with what he expresses through it. “Personal journeys play a big role in shaping who we are and what we do. If my work brings a smile to their faces, inspires them through the way I have expressed myself, and they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it, it would make me happy.”
(‘Between Chapters’ will be on display from October 31 to November 22, at Carpe Diem Art Gallery, Majorda.)
