Big Small Happiness: An Artist's Perspective On Life

New Delhi, Jan 13 (UNI) In this huge fiendish world, it is small happiness that counts big.

And the versatile Priyanka Choudhary depicts a human mind's quest for happiness in small things through her paintings-- the brush and canvas singing in rhythm to create new melodies of art.

For the brilliant Delhi College of Art Graduate, who has launched her first solo exhibition-- Big Small Happiness-- her paintings are the window through which she looks at the world of happiness, and all the fantasies it involves.

''Things that we often take for granted, if perceived with a third eye, reveal immense power and meaning,'' she says in front of her oil canvases that show a kind of splendiferous native simplicity.

But it was after seven years in the advertising world-- three years as art director at two well-known creative agencies-- that she found the real meaning of life and her calling.

Those seven years, when she painted only on rare weekends, her expression as an artist changed dramatically as did her impressions of life, till she simplified it all to a personal teeny truth: Big Small Happiness.

She chucked her lucrative career and plunged into the world of art, thus embarking on a journey of inner self.

The talented artist locates happiness in her dreamy landscapes with small figures in them who sit, climb trees, dance in the midst of the vast empty space within nature, finding joy, harmony and innocence.

The bright hues of blue, turquoise, green, yellow and orange, and a profuse use of pure white, give her landscapes the character of fairytale happiness.

She has, however, refused to title her works, believing that titling in a way filters the viewer's response, and takes away the intutive.

''Titling a work restricts the mind into seeing it with a particular perspective,'' she says.

Her current body of work can, in fact, be arranged into two approaches-- the notion of gestural primarily from Van Gogh and the influence of Japanese watercolour and calligraphy as evident in broad vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines of paints.

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