Vijay Nagvekar has been a painter all his life and cannot imagine doing anything else. Having studied Fine Arts in Mumbai, he now lives and works in Bangalore. His series on water lilies is inspired by his idol Claude Monet, the French Impressionist painter. “Water colours are a difficult medium to work with as any error remains on the canvas for good.

 “I visualise the whole picture, sometimes even sketch it entirely and only then sit down to paint it. Water colours are an unforgiving medium unlike oils or acrylics where you can paint over and layer your work. It is also an intrinsically Indian medium as we have used them since time immemorial. Before foreigners brought in oils,” he says.

Painting for Vijay is almost like meditation, a happy peaceful exercise and his paintings of restful pools of lotus lilies with dappled sunlight reflecting off the water are peaceful and happy. Travelling provides Vijay much inspiration and he has almost developed a photographic memory for scenic bits of the countryside that reproduces in his work. Although he works with other mediums, watercolours remain his favourite.

Srividhya, a topper from Chitrakala Parishat, takes a few days to mull over the subject of her paintings. She then immerses the whole canvas in water and goes into a painting frenzy translating her inner vision into art, a technique she calls a wet on wet style where time is of the essence and you have to finish your work before the painting dries. She finds this both challenging and motivating. Her paintings are strangely poignant images of trees or branches with  occasional bursts of flowers.

The colours are muted and the trees are softly shrouded in mist and fog and yet are mesmerising and almost magnetic.

“Yes my paintings have a haunting dream-like quality about them and they also reflect the powerful dynamics between men and women which constantly change. Sometimes the woman is more powerful in a relationship,sometimes the man and sometimes they neutralise each other,” she explains.

Subir Dey an artist who lives in Kolkata has displayed his series of  trees and wooded forests done in earth colours and greys, blues and yellows. The play of light and shadow,the filtering of the early dawn light  through the trees or the fading colours of the evening are done in soft shaded tones.

The exhibition is on till  August 30 at Time and Space Gallery, Lavelle Road.