The Hindu : New Delhi News : An upcoming pencil artist fighting against all odds

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jun 08, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

An upcoming pencil artist fighting against all odds

Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

NEW DELHI: Having had a providential escape when at the age of four he was hit by a speeding truck and having survived the subsequent memory loss which forced him to give up on formal education when he was in Class V, 18-year-old Vijit Bhargava has come a long way having proved himself as not only a great artist with pencil but also a good paper work craftsman.

At an age when most other children are worried about their future, Vijit shows no signs of any insecurity. Rather he appears very focused on what he is doing. But then that is how he has always been. In the accident he was thrown nearly 30 feet off his grandfather's two-wheeler and landed head down on the road divider. As a result, Vijit had suffered partial memory loss due to which his adaptability of writing had diminished and he had to withdraw from school.

However, Vijit's parents - Sulekha, who takes art classes, and father Rajeev Bhargava, a taxation lawyer -- did not allow the handicap to harm their child's growth. And that shows. Vijit worked on his strengths that were primarily identification and close observation of objects and things around him.

Thereafter he took to the same pencil -- which did not allow him to write well -- to put the objects around him on paper. The deep sense of observation and his flair for shading reflects in the numerous pencil drawings the boy has done. While most of these are inspired by objects around him such as a vase or a flower pot or even a room or a nearby lane, others have also been done on themes. "Fear was the theme of about 10 drawings I made. Like all other works, even in this I did not draw while looking at any object, the idea just comes from what I remember of objects or images seen in the past."

Though he has tried his hand at various kinds of paper craft, Vijit is especially enamoured by the paper masks he makes out of pastel or cartridge sheets. So good is Vijit at this craft that it takes him less than two minutes to come out with a mask -- each of which has a different look. While some of the masks portray the devil, a sword handle, a Chinese face, others go deeper still into subjects like mythology by depicting, say, Shiva and his bull, Nandi.

Assisting his mother in the ongoing art workshop at the National Museum in New Delhi, Vijit says it is always good to interact with people as it help the learning process both ways. While he is now gradually taking to different forms of art through colour paintings using mixed medium, Vijit is on the lookout for some formal guidance as ultimately he aims to make it big in the art world. However, he makes it clear that he does not imitate other people's works or styles, as he wants to develop his own separate identity.

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