Past Exhibitions
Portraits of Indian Trees: Arundhati Vartak
16 September 1999 – 29 February 2000
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in cooperation with Chatham College presented two exhibitions of artworks by Arundhati Vartak of Pune, India. The Hunt Institute displayed 40 watercolors in Portraits of Indian Trees: Arundhati Vartak. Chatham College displayed 73 sketches in Arundhati Vartak's Sketches: Souls of Her Paintings from 31 August 1999 through 25 September 1999 in the Chatham College Gallery of Art. The exhibition was presented by the Chatham College Arboretum and the Landscape Studies program as part of the college's yearlong celebration of the "Year of South Asia." A full-color, illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibitions.
Working in Pune and Mumbai, India, Arundhati Vartak is inspired by Indian miniature paintings but relies heavily on her thumbnail sketches and other studies based on a keen observation of her subjects. The artist is also inspired by reading old Sanskrit classics, including works by the poet Kalidasa. Her paintings have been published on greeting cards and postcards produced by the World-Wide Fund for Nature, India; CRY (Child Relief and You); the Society for the Education of the Crippled; the Bombay Natural History Society; and in various books, magazines and newspapers. She has held one-person exhibitions in Mumbai at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Artists' Centre, House of Soviet Culture, and Nehru Centre Art Gallery. Her paintings were included in the Hunt Institute's 8th International Exhibition of Botanical Art & Illustration (1995) and in Contemporary Botanical Artists: The Shirley Sherwood Collection.
