Ranbir Kaleka

Ranbir Kaleka is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in India whose works have been exhibited nationally, and internationally. What interests him the most is the human condition and the inner lives of people, which he believes "can only be hinted at but remains elusive at a conscious level". Kaleka's diverse painterly compositions are often created digitally. 

For the Circle of Life, he has created an outstanding piece. A seed is symbol of nature and its cycles. It is embryonic. It produces life, a tree or a plant which waits to die while it produces more seeds to perpetuate the cycle of life. In human life too nothing stays forever, sadness and happiness, confusion and clarity, destruction and growth follow this cycle. A seed bestows its gifts through cycles of clement weather (fertility), draughts and oods. 

The seed sustains life in the sky (represented by birds in the artwork) and the tiny critters on earth (represented by insects in the artwork). The tribal deities are protectors of agriculture and the bounty of mother earth and mother nature. The deities are the sustainer of life and its seasons and its cycles. 

Although known as digital paintings, such works would be accurately described as digital collages. The nal work can consist of hundreds of layers, they have gone to over two thousand in some works. He digitally shapes, colour, shade and use light on the objects (animals, trees etc.). 

Technology allows him to achieve whatever shape and effect he desires. He works on them the way he would work on a painting, for instance shaping the beak or tail of a bird, giving it multiple colours and directing light on it and so on. The multiple layers are collapsed into one and the whole is printed in archival inks on a canvas which is specially produced for this purpose. Finally, he decides to highlight or pushback certain areas using oil paint. Some part may need just the tiniest speck of oil paint to make it come live, other areas such as foliage may require more brushwork. 

As light bounces off differently from the oil paint than from the rest of the canvas it adds vibrancy to the image.