A person can always go a long way from humble beginnings. That is the unsung tale of Jagmohan Bangani, our esteemed modern artist. Born in a small Uttarakhand hamlet, he attended Dehradun for his higher education after completing his primary education there. At this point, he had to take up some part-time job with various social and private organisations in order to make ends meet. He relocated to Delhi after earning his master’s degree in painting and drawing from the University of Garhwal, where he was awarded a research fellowship by Lalit Kala Akademi in 2002.
He pursued a second master’s degree in fine art at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom’s Winchester School of Art in 2005. The themes of his earlier works included his country life, his new identity, and his life in Delhi. As he moved overseas, everything was filled with vibrant colours, dullness, hopes, disappointments, the need to succeed quickly, shallow city life, goals, and dreams. Scripts and texts from the many new languages he studied and the ones he was already familiar with were an essential element of his job in places far away where he was a foreigner and spoke a different language. The thing that keeps him going is planning art camps and seminars. It’s his means of making some money to support the nonprofit he works for.
