The 3D painting of a Kolkata street at Vivekananda Park Athletic Club, Haridevpur. Artist Tracy Lee Stum also seen. ( Source: Express photo by Partha paul ) The 3D painting of a Kolkata street at Vivekananda Park Athletic Club, Haridevpur. Artist Tracy Lee Stum also seen. ( Source: Express photo by Partha paul )

Those who have seen 3D street art in films and e-mail forwards, here is an opportunity to witness one in Kolkata. The puja organised by Vivekananda Park Athletic Club at Haridevpur has put this form of art on display for visitors. They roped in Tracy Lee Stum, an artist globally known for her street paintings, all the way from South California to help create the painting.

The theme has been called Tilottama which signifies both Goddess Durga and Kolkata. Different forms of arts have been blended in to depict the city and its transition over the years. While the 3D painting, which has a bird’s eye view, is spread on a giant plywood canvas of 25 feet by 20 feet on the floor, the ceiling has paintings of an ant’s eye view of different areas of the city. Along with Tracy, the other city artists who had been working on other works of art inside the pandal are Partha Dasgupta, Diptesh Ghosh Dastidar, Santanu Mitra, Surojit Paul and Somagni Biswas.

Talking to The Indian Express, Tracy said that she arrived in Kolkata on September 22 and worked for over 12 hours a day, to finish the painting in five and a half days. “My arrival had been delayed a bit and I was fighting against time to meet my deadline of September 27. I was working in tandem with four other artists here. Partha, in particular did all the research and sent me a lot of photographs via email and I scoured the net and sent back my suggestions. By the time I was ready to reach the city, I had a complete image of what it would look like so painting it was not a problem for me but what was more difficult was to put that image into the minds of five young students of the Government Art College here who were assisting me,” she said. As against the normal practice of using chalk pastels for street arts, Tracy has used acrylic paint in this case.

“The picture of Uttam Kumar, the legend of Bengali films I am told, and a ‘holood taxi’ (a yellow cab) is the centre around which familiar images of the city have been painted. Whoever takes a look at the image would easily identify that with different areas of the city,” she added.

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