manish kumar, post news network, Bhubaneswar, April 17: She has been appointed as the Australian Award Ambassador by the Australian government for the year 2015. Apart from getting the prestigious Prananath Samman-2013 for fine arts, she has been conferred with many national and international awards in the last 20 years. She is a writer, painter, musician, social scientist and above all an educationist.
What has made this 52-year-old student services director at the KIIT University a talking point in the field of art and craft, however, is her recent penchant for finger-tip painting. Sucheta Priyabadini, a PhD from the Utkal University has been passionately toiling hard since her childhood to experiment with diverse art forms to precisely portray on canvas human emotions and issues related to gender discrimination, social taboos, woman empowerment etc. It has been normal for her to wake up at wee the hours and fiddle with paints, brushes and canvas. But her new normal is to wake up at the same time and instead of paint brush use her fingers to draw human emotions on canvas. This has been going on for two years now.
“I am always fond of experimentations. In the last two years I have been putting in a lot of efforts to give perfection to finger-tip paintings where only fingers and not paint brushes are used to draw on the canvas. It is a challenging and arduous task to accomplish. In the last two years I have tried to produce paintings of Lord Jagannath, faces of women and also on the plethora of social issues,” says Sucheta, who has also been conferred the Chinta O Chetana National award.
Her paintings were displayed Friday on the premises of Utkal Mandap during the KIIT Baisakhi festival celebrations. According to unconfirmed sources, her paintings are also likely to be displayed for public at the Biju Patnaik International Airport in the city during an art exhibition scheduled to be held on April 26. Apart from preparing for the exhibition, Sucheta is getting ready to launch her maiden book in June this year. The book is about her experience with students during her long stint as a teacher and mentor to them.
Neighbours of Sucheta, however, know her for a ‘special’ reason. Her house is a unique one in her locality, which everyone living there knows. Sucheta has turned her home into a ‘museum’ where she has kept a heap of her works, ranging from watercolour painting, sculptures, woodwork glass engraving to embossing, and textile printing among others. “Many people known to me remember my house as a ‘mini museum’. I have put on display art works which I had been doing for the last four decades. I have experimented with diverse art forms and collection of all these could easily be found at my house,” she said.
Sucheta first thought of expressing her thoughts and emotions through paints and brushes when she was nine years old. She says being born in a Brahmin family and to be a daughter of an IPS officer, gave her wide exposure to the realities of social life and social disparities prevailing around her. According to her, these social realities and the existing disparities in the society provoked her to ‘speak’ at length on those menaces through different art forms. Sucheta, however, has always been overwhelmed by the response she got from her parents.
“I received tremendous support from my parents to pursue my passion. Their encouragement always gave impetus to my vocation. I feel myself lucky as I was never pulled back by my parents as most parents of the 70s did; they often compelled their wards to focus exclusively on studies. My parents were different. I believe the scenario has drastically changed now. Now most of the parents want to make their wards all-rounder and I believe this is how the society should be,” she said.
Sucheta, at present, guides students at KIIT to explore their hidden talents as director of students’ services. Many students often flock to her cabin to talk about their hobbies and get guidance on how to go about those.
