For the young and gawky Jatin Das, fresh out from the middle-class confines of the Mayurbhanj estate in Orissa, Bombay was a revelation in more ways than one. While JJ School of Arts, where Das was enrolled as a fine arts student, honed his visionary power - fed on the rich folk and tribal art of his native state – it was also the place where he found new meaning into human behaviour and relationships in context of society and nature.With a child-like delight, he took in everything and revelled in it, his sensitive fingers and listening eyes giving shape to each event. And in the process, created the famed nudes or "bare figures" as he calls them, to hit the Indian art scene in the '60s and '70s.And even today when the painter talks about life, art, society , nature and aesthetics, he is at times annoyed, at other times jubilant, but never resigned. The same child-like enthusiasm remains. Das gets upset with the fact that today everything, including art, is spoken of in terms of money. Yet, he understands the dichotomy. "I live on the sale of my paintings but I don't paint with the sales figures in mind," he says.Painting for him is a personal experience, not meant for the public. Which explains why he is one of the very few acknowledged contemporary Indian painters who holds his exhibitions after really long intervals. And nobody seems to have heard of his large collection of landscapes which he choose never to exhibit.And after nearly 40 years of painting and drawing, "When life has taken a half circle, with the travails of survival, and saving the soul," the artist once again tries to look back to reassess, examine and evaluate his work in relation to his dreams, ideas and actualisation in the form of a book - a memoir. About his personal experiences, his days in Orissa, Bombay and later in Delhi, the book will chronicle the making of an artist. But, "It's not a diary," he clarifies.Still in the initial stages of writing the book - as also his collection of poems (his second), an exhibition and a related book on his large collection of hand fans and terracota toys, the largest in the sub-continent, he informs you - is only a part of all that Das would like to do with "so little time left," a constant refrain he used to make even as a 20-year-old.But by his own admission, Das has been a loner throughout this journey. "I was never a part of a collective activity, except for signature campaigns. I went on with my own idiosyncrasies, never subscribing to a hackneyed idea of what an should be," he says.Separated from his wife and with his two children away on their respective careers performance in Deepa Mehta's film Fire and son Sidhartha who's doing his graduation in Ahemdabad in design, he is alone in his beautifully cramped studio-house in Delhi, where every nook and cranny is filled with bric-a-brac collected from all over. And amidst all this, with the same eagerness, he talks of another grand plan, the Dehradun-Missourie stretch, where he can paint, sculpt, make furniture or labour away at the potter's wheel, " And only because I am a painter who wants to be an artist," he says.
