A well regarded artist in her own right, Chaitali Morajkar’s real passion lies in
teaching art to kids. “It is what motivates me,” she says. “There is immense
talent and creativity hidden in children and art education in school is not
enough to bring out their imagination,” she adds.
While she enjoys the entire process from teaching art concepts
to creating detailed lesson plans, Morajkar went one step further to provide a
platform for her students to showcase their work with a mega annual art
exhibition. So far, this is her sixth exhibition and brings together over 90
young artists with 300 artworks to view!
This children’s art exhibition is supported by MOG as part of
their program ‘A World of My Own’, an initiative that seeks to engage children
to create and connect with art and enable them to explore new ways of seeing,
understanding and creating.
With the interesting theme reflected in the title of the show,
‘I Wish’, Morajkar asked her students to write something they dearly wished for
on a paper and give it to her. She says, “The students didn’t know that they
have to do the art work on their wish as I wanted the art work to be true to
the wish. Then the process of ideas, sketches, composing, references and
drawings started. It was interesting to see how the wish on a paper took its
visual form.”
The young artists were free to use any medium and style they
want to work in. The wishes were varied and included: I wish to go to space and
stand on the moon; I wish to design an AI dog; I wish to be like Billie Eilish;
I wish to create a device that can control parents’ mind; I wish to have a
house in the valley; I wish to eat all the chicken items in the world; I wish
to be Shawn Mendes; I wish I can develop Mapusa city; I wish I can hear and
understand animals, etc…
The children have used paper and canvases with colour pencils,
watercolour and acrylic as well as worked with papier-mâché, collage and clay.
There are also two collaborative works on view as well as some works done in
regular class. One work is where children have designed almost 200 letters,
which will then be put together to form a sentence. The second collaborative
work is titled ‘Cut off’, where each child makes a sparrow from papier-mâché
and these birds are then all exhibited together. The work references ideas of a
disappearing species, changes in lifestyle, global warming, air pollution and
so on.
The encouraging and thoughtfully curated show is a welcome boost
to Goa’s art scene. Says Morajkar, “This exhibition will encourage my students
as well as other children to paint and visually express themselves, giving a
boost to art education at every level. Sharing, appreciating and criticising
will make the students learn and grow. The journey from an ‘idea’ to its
‘visual form’ is experienced by students.
“Sharing
is as important as creating,” she concludes.
