Sekhar Mukherjee

National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India

Sekhar is a senior faculty of communication design. Studied AEP Animation Film Design from 1992 to 1995 at NID. He is from Kolkata and started his career as a newspaper cartoonist, illustrator and later info-graphics artist. He worked in various fields of communication design both in print, screen & web media for 7 years. 2002 he joined his alma mater. For 12 years he headed the department, which brought many student accolades and awards under his mentorship. He is artistic director of Chitrakatha-A biennial International Student Animation Festival since 2007. In 2009 he received Best Animation Teacher Award from CNBC-TV18.

Abstract:
What my Sketchbook means to me?

The other day when I told one of my animation students that I wanted to see the sketches in his notebook, he came with the digital one! That did not shock me but what made me sad was that the entire gadget was full with either Spidermen or Hanumen (deliberate spelling mistake here). I feel the ‘itch’ was missing from his work. It’s only form but no content, no stories and also no worries of the world we live in. Or maybe I am completely wrong in my thoughts, which I keep on recording in my sketchbooks since I learned to hold a pencil!

Born in a big family of post partition Bengal, I grew up listening to stories from brilliant two-colored block printed illustrated books to start with. Some of the magical illustrator’s work gave me kick to draw. I salute through my sketchbooks those inspiring madmen of illustration from Bengal like Ohibhushan Malik, Sukumar Ray, Soilo Chakraborty. The work of Maurice Sendak, Don Martin, William Steig, Otto Dix to name a few off course was there to fuel my mind while my eyes lapped them all. This overdose of visual hogging got released in my school notebooks, homework copy, and the empty walls of my home and much later in series of sketchbooks. Always a backbencher, observing the moments of daily mundane chores around there was a ‘the perennial itch’ to fill any empty space around me.

Hence I continue with my scrapbooks, which became part of me, a fantastic affordable device to store my secret ideas and crazy scribbles flowing out from the restless recording of moments in and around me and of this complex mad frenzied world we live in. I also discovered the intoxicating beauty of relative truths through my sketchbooks, which came in various shapes and sizes. This series of sketchbooks/scrapbooks are nothing but my freedom song, my idea bank, my memoir, my open secret diary and my oxygen mask to keep my hope alive.

So the sketchbooks are my visual performance, my dialogue, my visual data bank, the external soft-disc one may say! So I told my student that day about my tactile notebook and the addiction of writing pictures or drawing words in them- ‘My Sketchbook’.