This is the fourteenth edition of JTPL Stories: a series of interviews with library patrons, staff, and partners. Continue below to meet the faces of JTPL with our Outreach Coordinator, Aliya! Click Here to read the entire series.
Dr. Subhranil De, this month’s Clarksville gallery artist, begins his artwork by sketching on a classroom whiteboard with vivid and otherworldly colors. He uses bright oranges for skin, greens and purples for clothes and landscapes. Many of his scenes are dream-like and strange in their original form.
His sketches float on the whiteboard like intricate doodles a bored student made between classes. Then, he takes a photograph and digitally inverts the colors on his computer to create his final art pieces.
One of his favorites, pictured below, is of a mermaid playing a harp beside a moonlit sea. Above her float cirrocumulus clouds like scales or birds in the shape of a woman. He titled it “A Mermaid Rising.”
Dr. De told me he started making negative color artwork during COVID, as he was teaching his IUS physics courses from home. For him, it was a way to turn a tough time into something creative and joyous.
“It was quite a heavy time,” he said. “I’m a gregarious, very social person and I was just feeling kind of secluded. So, between me recording lectures, sometimes I would take a break and doodle on the board… I could feel, in a playful way, that lost little artist within me that I had forgotten from the age of 14 was coming back to life.”
Soon, Dr. De began sharing his art with close friends and family as a way to spread the joy he’d found while drawing. They loved it. At their insistence, he created an Instagram for his work, and his art took off from there.
Now, he’s displayed pieces at IUS and interviewed with the Arts Alliance of Southern Indiana’s local podcast. He even has an Etsy page where he sells prints of his work. Despite this success, Dr. De remains humble and grateful. It’s not about the recognition for him.
“I was surprised in a wonderful way,” Dr. De told me, “and grateful, deeply grateful. I was doing all this as a hobby… Now the goal of my motivation is to expose it to a broader audience, and if more people love it, then, hey, I’m touching a few more hearts. That’s always a delightful feeling.”
It’s the joy of creation that keeps Dr. De coming back to make more work. He enjoys playing with color theory and experimenting with how different shades turn out in negative color. But most of all, Dr. De loves seeing the faces of people touched by his art. He recounted to me several touching and inspiring stories of friends who were impacted by his work.
Dr. De’s exhibit, “The Tale of a Silver Lining – An Adventure in Negative Color,” will be displayed at our Clarksville location until the end of March. It includes many of his art pieces as well as his inspirations arranged throughout the library.
Although his title is a reference to his distinct color inversion technique, it also comes from how his art began and how he’d like it to continue. It was the silver lining around the dark time that COVID was for himself and many others. Dr. De hopes his art will be a silver lining for other people too.
“Because of its springing during the otherwise lonesome, secluded time of the pandemic lockdown,” he writes, “I believe my fond avocation to be a true tale of a silver lining.”
In addition to being a physics professor and an artist, Dr. Subhranil De is also an author and a poet. He recently published a book about his time in the northern US titled “The Time on the Gravel Roads” and plans to write a new book this year, “The Tale of a Silver Lining.” If you would like to know more, you can follow him on Instagram and Etsy!