Reflection

Blake in Photoshop

City Collage 01

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Screen Shot 01

This graphics is a manipulated and enhanced version of a composite snap of my laptop, its wall paper and my window's reflection on the TFT screen of my MacBook.

MacShot 063

See more about MacShot at SamitRoy.org

Revolution by Consent

A cover for a book dealing with political controversies related to the constitution of democratic India and it's formation.

Wild Pepper Forest - Reworked

I have reworked on the earlier version of 'Wild Pepper Forest' to create a cover for a Bengali Literature Magazine, Kaurab, which was founded by Kamal Chakraborty, a magazine which he also edited for 30 years.

More on this work

Unwanted Illustration

Unwanted Illustration

Wathing TV - Emotionally Red

One from the series of images [Watching TV] that are inspired by and derived from the images I have captured from TV while surfing channels, aimlessly.

MacShot 062

Insomnia in red and white

Saturday 25th August 2007 6.22 AM

Few more random images picked up from my "MacShot Project"

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My MacShot Project:
A series of low-res unedited (except built-in features in Mac Photobooth) photos of myself and other objects surrounding me and my MacBook, taken by the tiny inbuilt Webcam and a software called Photobooth that came with the MacBook.

MacShot 061

Insomnia in Blue!

Saturday 25th August 2007 6.22 AM

My MacShot Project:
A series of low-res unedited (except built-in features in Mac Photobooth) photos of myself and other objects surrounding me and my MacBook, taken by the tiny inbuilt Webcam and a software called Photobooth that came with the MacBook.

MacShot 60

Anger in red!

Time: Not noted!

My MacShot Project:
A series of low-res unedited (except built-in features in Mac Photobooth) photos of myself and other objects surrounding me and my MacBook, taken by the tiny inbuilt Webcam and a software called Photobooth that came with the MacBook.

Exodus

Since I was a kid, I have often witnessed hundreds and thousands of homeless, uprooted people, coming out of the dark caves of poverty and hunger, crossing the borders & the fences and walking towards a darker future, with their face glowing with meaningless hope. They know that they might not reach anywhere; still they wish to continue their journey, their Exodus, for a better home, a better world. In this image, I have tried to capture, the endless, meaningless journey of homeless people, crossing borders and checkposts, hiding in the darkness of cloudy nights, and being threatened by their own transitory existence, for years.

MacShot 056

Thursday 5 July 2007 20.54 PM (IST)

.. i saw him .. the green monster .. with a bleeding heart ..

My MacShot Project:
A series of low-res unedited (except built-in features in Mac Photobooth) photos of myself and other objects surrounding me and my MacBook, taken by the tiny inbuilt Webcam and a software called Photobooth that came with the MacBook.

Reconstruction: Level 1 - 3

RECONSTRUCTION - LEVEL 1

The original work is done by Suman Kalyan Ghosh. I've put it up on the board beside my workstation. I took a snap of a very small part of the image from an unusual angle. I have consciously included the signature of Suman at strategic position within the frame, so that it can add value the entire composition, as a visual element, too. I have also included the yellow board pin, that has been used to put the original painting on the board.

RECONSTRUCTION - Level 2

This is Level 2 of the project Reconstruction. The board pin is now playing more vital role in the composition. The signature became more visually integrated with the entire image. Repetition of elements have started taking the persona of the composition away from the one in "Reconstruction - Level 1"

RECONSTRUCTION - Level 3

As the reconstruction goes on, the personality of the image changes. A faint hint of my urban complication has started sipping in into Suman's subconscious innocence.

An extended note on my ideas of "reconstruction" and more about this project

Family Photograph

Landscape in the Mist: Remembering Angelopoulos

Landscape in the Mist: Remembering Angelopoulos

An extention of this work!

Music in Blues

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Music in Blues (2007)

Another aimless graphics! Well, not so aimless actually! I am planning to put it as a poster oin the walls of my study!

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Glo ball isation

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Glo ball isation (2007)

And you can see it's a time for Glo ball isation - an age of Glowing Balls!

See the Bengali Version here! [Requires IE]

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Melon Time

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Melon Time (2007) [Tormujkaal]

I see the dead watermelons in this season and red.

Read the Bengali version here! [Requires IE]

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Untitled

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Untitled (2007)

I always like those aimless, apparently meaningless, untitled images that I generate while playing with or scribling on my old, dumped or unfinished works on a lazy morning or a Saturday night! I never wanted to achieve something or preach some messages through these works. They are just visual expressions of a particular state of my subconscious mind and they are never conscious constructions with specific goals. I just let the colors and lines flow as they want resulting images that6 talk about themselves, not about me or my consciuos thought process.

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Park Street Jn.

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Park Street Jn. (2004)

Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, always amuses me, with her vibrancies, colors, lives, ever-changing moods and of course with her warmth. I was born and brought up there; felt her presence around me through my childhood, adolescence and my youth. Each node of the city has multiple images stored for me, multiple stories; each one reflecting various ages, various times of my life. Park Street was a place crowded with yellow taxis and traffic polices with white uniforms, as I used to see it when I was a kid. A kid from suburb, who came to visit a fair or an event near Park Street, and stumbled upon the busy policemen, busy traffic of busy Park Street.

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I Was Eating My Head

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I Was Eating My Head (2002)

'It was me who was eating my head!! My head!! It was eaten by me!! It was me!! I ate my head!!'

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Another one dumped from my old backup CDs. Probably, it was the first one where I consciously thought about introducing text as inseparable part of the entire object. You can see, the text is still very stiff, in comparison to my other visual-textual work in later years.

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One More Story Illustration

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Illustration (1989)

One more from my old and yellow paper folder of story illustrations from the my 'teen' days! I remember how I used the nozzle of a water color tube to draw the basic thick lines to form the figure, directly on the paper without any brush and then tried to bring out the details with small strokes and thin lines of a felt pen.

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Eeshwar Darshan

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Eeshwar Darshan (2004)

I wanted to name this image as "Gopal-er Eeshwar Darshan" (Gopal's Meeting With God), but later I decided to remove 'Gopal' and call it just 'Eeshwar Darshan'. Well, why I did that? Only because it was really tough for me to bring out the true meaning of 'Gopal' - the iconic good boy in Bengali Literature.

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Cabomba furcata

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Cabomba furcata (2004)

As a kid, I used to spend almost every bit of my pocket money and piggybank savings for all those glass jars and bowls and glass tanks and little colorful fishes. Later, as I grew up, I started becoming much serious about this hobby. I realized that an aquarium is not a spectacular toy or showpiece like a marble statue or porcelain flower vase on the center table. Rather it is a living mechanism; breathing, growing, aging, just like us.

As I started spending more time with them, a completely new world was unfurled before me. I was moved by the works and philosophies of Karen Randall, the spectacle and organic beauty of Amano Takashi’s aquascapes. I started enjoying the joy of working on a visual composition with living and growing splashes of colors, which keeps on changing every moment. It is a real challenge to foresee the patterns that your plants might create when they grow up and to provide all required elements and environment that they might require.

Click here to visit my Aquarium Blog at http://aquasamit.blogspot.com

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Death of A Mustache

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Death of A Mustache (2004)

When Veerappan died in police encounter, the first thing came to my mind is, 'It's not a death of a man or a sandalwood smuggler or a notorious bandit or the infamous brigand; it is actually a death of a great mustache!'

I might sound funny or weird but I was very much impressed by his mustache, since I have seen his picture on a newspaper when I was in high school!

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Rampage

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Rampage (2007)

A kind of rememberance for all the hours spent on GTA Vice City – scheming a ‘rampage’, ‘wasting the wife', executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’.

These games ought to be part of a much larger political debate. Take a hard look at the representation of the non-whites – cab drivers are men in turbans similar to Indian Sikhs (remeber GTA 3: Liberty City); Cubans comprise a notorious gang of gun-weiding criminals; the most dangerous area of the virtual city is labelled as 'Little Haiti' or 'Little Havana', where gangs of black and brown-skinned criminals play cat and mouse with the white-skinned police.

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My Sleep, Awake & White

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My Sleep, Awake & White (2003)

... was thinking 'bout you and my sleep, awake & whitish, was rolling, rolling and spreading over the whole city ... [ Tr. by Madhuban Mitra ]

... Quand mes sommeils blancs et reveillés diffusaient la cité entièrement ... [ Tr. by Rouflaquettes Dorees ]

Poésie-visuelle de Samit-Rouflaquettes

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I continue to call them Visual Poetry for the lack of a sharper articulation. The text is in Bengali, as in most of my other Visual Poems. This piece is one of my initial efforts to combine visual and textual elements in making a single object. The 'poetry' in these artworks could be questioned, but what I was essentially attempting was to distribute the effort towards building a narrative into two parallel modes of communication - textual and visual. For example, I wanted the audience of this particular object to feel a soporific night in the city, without articulating the same emotion through words. I desisted from using the word 'night' in the text, but reinforced it in the visual, through the suggestion of a city skyline in shades of dark blue and black.

This piece was published in Annetna Nepo (Bulletin 9 Apr 2003), a Multilingual Poetry Review magazine. I hope that they haven't taken it off their archives!

Click here to visit Annetna Nepo >

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Dripping Sins

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Dripping Sins (2003)

… then … as sin dripped down from the sky … sin dripping down … sin dripping … and then … dripping from the sinful sky … the sins of the sinful sky … only a trickle … only … just … no more than … sins gathering sins accumulating … sins accruing sins multiplying … sins swelling sins surging … more sins piled on sins … and more sins heaped on sinful sins …
[ Tr. by Madhuban Mitra ]

Ensuite … la pêche descendait du ciel en coulant vers la terre … et en coolant du ciel pêchant … et les pêches du ciel pêchant … qu’un chatouillage… rien que la pêche … se reunissent … s’accumulent … s’accroissent … la pêche gonflante … la pêche sautante … plus de pêches posées sur la pêche … et plus de pêches balancées sur la pêche péchante …
[ Tr. by Rouflaquettes Dorees ]

Poésie-visuelle de Samit-Rouflaquettes

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This is one of my own favorites. Few years back, while trying to understand the enormous amount of possibilities that could be generated by putting image and text together and fusing them into one comprehensive concept, I realized if I remove all direct references of the so called 'image' part of this unique concoction of 'image' and 'text' and use only the visual elements generated from the 'text' part, it might lead me to another set of possibilities. Letters do have their own visuals. A line of text has a specific visual appeal, apart from its literal meaning and literary connotations. It has specific shapes, lines and colors - the essential ingredients for an 'image'. It is like, drawing with text.

I was trying to create a visual image of sins, constantly dripping from the endless sky and piling up forming a heap of sins. I formed a long and continuous sentence, as if it is an one-line description of the entire scene and used that text to generate a visual form which suggests something is dripping down continuously and piling up at the bottom. It worked for me!

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Comics

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Comics (2004)

Since my childhood, I was always mesmerized by the magical world of images and text of comic books and the bikini-clad girlfriends of the super heroes with their funny graphical sounds like, "YEEEEKS" and "BLAAAAM" and "VROOOOOMS" in bold and extruded typeface, crossing the boundaries of those small boxy frames and rigid panels. I always wanted to create a comic strip, but it never happened till date. The only thing that I could do is to fuse one of my unfinished poem about a weekend trip to a rejected photograph from the same trip and make a conscious effort to simulate the eerie ambience of the first cell of a dark action comics strip - still without a story, waiting for a hostile moment to begin its journey through the pages of our childhood fears.

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Sketch: Self-portrait # 82

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Digital Sketch: Self-portrait # 82 (2006)

I am always very much fascinated by the idea of self-portraits. An image, that portrays one's self - that is how I perceive them. This whole idea of self-portrait, however, leaves me in the middle of a strange circus of representations, where everyone is moving with their faces covered with a blank page of a sketch book. When they meet each other, they quickly draw self-portraits and simply exchange them.

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Reflection

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Reflection (2006)

Sometimes, I do feel that it is nothing but a reflection! A reflection that covers the sceen, the chips, cables, ports, keyboard - everything!

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Early Illustration

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Illustration (1989)

Those were my days of prints and papers and PTS and ink; news papers and Sunday Edtions. The beginning of my career as a visual artist. I was in my late teen then and I used to like the smell of rubber solution!

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Another Early Illustration

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Illustration (1990)

Another story illustration from the initial days of my career as a Commercial Artist cum Illustrator for a local newspaper!

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Urban Conversation - A Concept Sketch

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Urban Conversation - A Concept Sketch

I like to simulate the feel of analog media - the good old pencils and rolls of art paper, in my digital works!

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Iconic Emotions: Jealous

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Iconic Emotions: Jealousy (2001)

An image from my Illustration series called 'Iconic Emotions'!

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Iconic Emotions: Amazed

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Iconic Emotions: Amazed (2001)

Another image from my illustration series called 'Iconic Emotions'!

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Magazine Cover: Chirantan

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Magazine Cover: Chirantan (2003)

I designed this cover for a Bengali Literature Magazine, named Chirantan.

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And Birds & Myriad Birds

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And Birds & Myriad Birds (2004)

... and birds and birds and birds and myriad birds spouted from my head ...
[ Tr. by Madhuban Mitra ]

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This is another image from my Visual Poetry collection. Being a poet and a literature enthusiast, I always like working with text. Again, on the other hand , my designer self is never satisfied with simple, conventional display of text forming a linear pattern. I noticed, how the entire meaning of the text could be changed if I display them in an unconventional manner, following the psychological patterns, evoked by the inner meaning of that particular text piece.

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Gnarled & Tangled

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Gnarled & Tangled (2003)

… indeed … our gnarled and tangled roots condense thicken deepen … plumbing quite deep now, shallow next…probing … delving deep again … up for air in a moment … up up … and pause … cease … abate … yet down once more … unfathomable … bottomless … deep into the impregnable squares of stones ...
[ Tr. by Madhuban Mitra ]

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I really don't like to call them Visual Poetry, but I never had a better word! However, on a second thought I realized that no other word can express the idea, other than this one - Visual Poetry. I consider them as 'poetry' and they are quite 'visual', too!

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Struggle of Life

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Struggle of Life (2006)

I alwyas liked the effect one can bring in, using Corel Painter with a Digital pen - a dream combo, as any digital artist would agree. The presure sensitive feature of a digital pen can really do a miracle if used optimally with the 'painting' intelligence of Painter.

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Other Side of The Bread

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Book Cover - Rutir Opith (2006)

The other side of our bread! We have never seen that! Or did we? I remember, when I worked for this Bengali novel, Rutir Opith