Kolkata Centre for Creativity Organises Ray: Speak through Graphic Design

Kolkata: Kolkata Centre for Creativity is conducting a series of online talk sessions - 'Ray: Speak through graphic design', on the occasion of Indian film director, writer, illustrator and music composer Satyajit Ray's centenary celebration in 2020.  

These talks broadly focus on Ray's outstanding contribution in the field of graphic designing and various other creative manifestations of the celebrated versatile genius that brings up a comparative outlook between 21st century character and set designing techniques that were prevalent during Ray's time.

The first edition of the series took place in the month of May, 2020 and Kolkata Centre for Creativity will now be organising the fourth and final talk session of this series on Saturday November 07 from 7:00 pm onwards on Zoom Webinar and Facebook.

This session is in collaboration with the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives and the prestigious panel will have Ray's son Sandip Ray who himself is a Film Director & also the Member-Secretary of Ray Society, Soukarya Ghosal, Film Director,  Siladitya Sen, Film Critic & Essayist and the session will be moderated by Riddhi Goswami, Assistant Professor, Heritage Institute of Technology & Member of Ray Society. 

The talk will focus on Ray's dedication to frame his characters and how he gave them life by sketching every scene of the film in his mind, the costumes, jewellery, backdrop and setting for films like 'Pather Panchali', 'Gupi Gain Bagha Bain' and 'Hirak Rajar Deshe'.

The first three sessions of the Ray series brought to light the outstanding contribution of Ray in the field of graphic designing with detailed discussion about various fields including 'Cover designing', 'Illustrations', 'Calligraphy' and the entire gamut of artistic endeavour related to different stories and writings. 

One of the earlier sessions discussed Ray's illustration of his own stories and the usage of surreal depictions of hand painted motifs interplayed with playful lettering and photo montages resembling a kind of pop art in Feluda, Professor Shanku, Tarini Khuro, Bankubabur Bandhu, Mullah Nasiruddin, Fatik Chand among others. 

The panellists for the past sessions were Debasish Deb, a well-known graphic designer,  Debasis Mukhopadhyay, Historian, researcher and a bibliophile, Pinaki De, Graphic illustrator-designer and  Ujjal Chakrabarty, Faculty member at Roop Kala Kendra.

Many years after his death, the memory of Ray's talent as a graphic designer is not entirely lost, as his films carry on the legacy of a visual artist determined to explore, in his words, "the half shades, the hardly audible notes" of human beings and their relationships.(UNI)