Art and culture are part of every Indian home and are respected widely, but not many parents allow their kids to pursue art as a career. Sisir Sahana’s father too did the same in the ’80s, but Sisir, who fell in love with painting, had made up his mind. He left his home in Mangalpur village, West Bengal, to join the Kala Bhavana of Visva Bharati University in 1982. And if he hadn’t done that, today he wouldn’t have been in Vijayawada with his new art show of paintings and glass sculptures.
Today, his father is a proud man and why wouldn’t he be? Sisir is now the principal at the college where he pursued his masters and is also the only Indian to make glass art work, mainly sculptures. And to add to his list of glories, Sisir has also been invited by the Burapha University, Thailand, to make a glass art studio.
However, all his works reflect the society and rural India. One of his acrylic paintings in the current show which shows a Barbie doll inside a farmer’s house, staring at a decorated bull, says it all. In the show, Sisir displays 36 artworks a mix of glass sculptures and glass and acrylic paintings. “The themes are ‘Barbie and India’, ‘Exile In The Wild’ among others others. These art pieces are works that I created in 2006 and 2012 respectively,” he says.
Sisir is now the principal at the college.
After learning the basics of painting from Samar Mukherjee of Burdwan Art School, Samar advised Sisir to join the BA course at Santiniketan.
“My father did not like this as one of my uncles — an artist — had committed suicide then. However, I left for Santiniketan and it was Mukerjee sir who funded my education till my father realised my passion,” says Sisir.
So, how did he come to use glass? “One of my gurus K.G. Subramanyam was one of the best glass painters. And I chose glass as a subject for my master’s degree and since then, glass has been my best companion. I learnt stain painting from
London and thought of introducing it in India, but the raw materials were not available.
I bought raw materials from Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kolkata and started making stain glass works. It then went on to glass sculpting, glass casting, glass fusing and so on,” says Sisir who has made over 100 unique glass sculptures at his self-designed furnace in Hyderabad.
