By Bonnie Gangelhoff
When he was growing up in Calcutta, India, Raj Chaudhuri was fascinated by American movies about cowboys and Indians. When he was growing up in Calcutta, India, Raj Chaudhuri was fascinated by American movies about cowboys and Indians.—Chaudhuri studied economics instead. In 1989 he was awarded a full scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. For more than a decade he worked as a computer consultant, until recently, when he decided to turn a leisure-time pursuit of painting into a profession.
For subject matter, Chaudhuri is drawn to scenes where people are engaged in activities, from quaffing coffee at a sidewalk café in his adopted hometown, Denver, to selling fruit at a market in his native India. “Even if the person is just a rickshaw driver or a poor farmer, they are doing things with passion, and that attracts me,” he says. “I am passionate about capturing people doing something ordinary. I find beauty in that.”
For Chaudhuri, who studied with Mark Daily and Quang Ho at the Art Students League of Denver, painting is about capturing the essence of a scene, not portraying it photorealistically. “If I can combine the abstract with the realistic, that is the fine dance that I am after,” he says. Chaudhuri is represented by Abend Gallery, Denver, CO, and www.rajchaudhuri.com.
Featured in “Artists to Watch” July 2006