Chitra Pritam

Chitra Pritam’s work, if you had to describe it to someone who has never seen it, is really about light and what light does to a feeling. He is not trying to paint things accurately. Impressionism pulled him away from that early on, toward something harder to name, the atmosphere of a moment, the inner experience of being somewhere at a specific time. That is what he chases on canvas and mostly catches.

His mentor, Jamil Naqsh, shaped a lot of how he got there. Under Naqsh, the whole approach became about spontaneity, about sensitivity, thin brushwork, and warm tones, doing work that tight, careful painting simply cannot do. Village life keeps showing up in his canvases, nature, spiritual reflection, subjects that come from actual memory rather than from looking around for something interesting to paint. That personal source is why his compositions feel the way they do, intimate in a way that is hard to fake and timeless in a way that is hard to explain.

For Chitra Pritam, the question was never how to make a painting technically correct. It was always about how to make it feel like something. Light, mood, memory, those are the tools he actually works with; the color and oil and canvas are just how he gets them onto a wall where someone else can experience them too.