Show and Tell - July 26 2025 - Part 1

On July 26th we had Show and Tell meeting in our MANA group

Show and tell meeting:

This is a way of connecting with other Marathi artists in our group to show our work, learn from each other and enhance our skills. In a typical meeting, we organize an accomplished guest artist for either demo or talk. In addition, in second part of the meeting, each participating artist shows their painting and receives feedback on it. This helps us get better in our art practice.

Part 1 of meeting - the Demo:

For the demo artist for this meeting, we had Shri Ashok Hinge, who is a very accomplished calligraphy artist.

As part of his demo, he started with showing us writing very basic Devanagari alphabets. I was surprised to know that there is a structure to writing the alphabet for a beginner artist. Once the basic alphabets and phrases are practiced, one can advance to writing stylized phrases. The stylized writing shows an artist's creativity and one can start recognizing their style. Of course it may take long to get to that stage of stylized calligraphy writing, where drawing lines and shapes of these alphabets becomes second nature! But he made it look so easy !!

Ashok ji also showed us where this art of Calligraphy can be applicable as follows:

-        The skills of writing basic alphabets could be useful for writing big size banners as an example, where people can read it quickly on the go. 

-        The creative stylized writing is useful for creating wedding invitations or greeting cards etc. as an example, where people take time to look at it up close and read. 

       Eg: "Leena" and "Purush" in below picture are basic alphabets. Where as "Prakruti" is stylized.

Written by Shri Hinge for Demo

-        The above applications of calligraphy we see quite commonly in our day to day lives as well in different kinds of prints / brochures / Shop banners etc. But I liked the third angle he presented, where artistic calligraphy can be used in Paintings we create or on Fabric arts too. One of his creations on saree is below. More of his paintings and artworks incorporated with calligraphy art can be seen here -  https://www.instagram.com/artist_ashok_hinge/

 

 In conclusion, it was a very wonderful presentation and all our artists thoroughly enjoyed it and came out with ideas of how they can enhance their art using calligraphy skills.

Part 2 of meeting - Showing paintings and receiving feedback - continued in next post... CLICK HERE