Art is soul’s mate: Lalit Mittal
Lalit Mittal at Ku-ring-Gai Art Society’s Spring Exhibition
By Vijay Badhwar
Architect Lalit Mittal’s painting ”˜Tulips’ was so appropriate for the recent exhibition of the Ku-ring-Gai Art Society to celebrate spring that it made to their invitation card to announce for their patrons the display of nearly 300 paintings by prominent artists at the St Ives Village in September.
Lalit Mittal is a professional architect who graduated from the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, a campus designed by India’s best known architect, Priktzers Award winner, B V Doshi.
Art and architecture go hand-in-hand in a symbiotic relationship that one can not do without the other – the expression, sense of space/depth, profundity of colours and beauty. Both touch the soul making a deeper inner expression whether one knows the language or not.
Lalit’s style is in all mediums, but, more recently, he prefers water colours. His charcoal sketches are specially appealing as the shades highlight the subject’s expression and depth. His most favourite subject is his wife, Vandana, whose several oil/water colour portraits adorn his home office in Epping. In between projects, mostly residential design, and especially during the Covid-19 lockdown, he loves to sketch, paint and photograph.
Lalit reminisces Smita Patil visiting the Ahmedabad campus during his student days. He had painted the film star in oil that had appeared on the front cover of the magazine Youth Time. She was flabbergasted and signed the painting, making Lalit, too, a star at the campus.
Lalit’s best artists, he says, are Van Gogh and Salvador Dali. And his architectural guru is, of course, Doshi.
He says, art is good to relax, get away from worldly tensions and also away from the computer. “But during lockdown, there was no option as the Ku-Ring-Gai Art Society cancelled all its scheduled meetings and encouraged members to join an art challenge on specific topics such as pets, family holidays, sea etc and submit their art on Facebook,” says Lalit.
In recent times, Lalit has been volunteering for the Wesley Mission, guiding and teaching senior citizens in art and drawing, sketching and painting in different mediums. That, he finds comforting twice over: art and being a part of the wider society.
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