Sucheta Ghadge was born on June 25, 1986 in the village of Kameri, district Satara in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Her journey of becoming an artist is a mixed story of inherent talent and chance incidents. When she drew figures beautifully in her childhood and teenage years, she never thought she was going to become a full-time, professional artist. She wasn’t even aware that people could become full-time artists or that there was academic training for learning art, until the completion of her school education. Thus knowledge about fine art courses created an exciting sense of discovery in her mind and she entered the curriculum even against the will of her parents. This incident defines the general life course of Indian women artists who belong to semi-rural backgrounds, having enormous pressure to stay in the accepted role of an Indian woman, expected to mold their visions and personalities according to male-dominated paternalistic values. As a result, everything outside this domain is a kind of discovery; an existing non-existent entity in their world just because it is forbidden. Thus Sucheta’s work can be interpreted in terms of her strong determination to become an artist, having no gender but just an artist. She completed her education from Bharti Vidya Peeth College of Fine Art, Pune in Maharashtra. She has exhibited her work in art shows and galleries across India and her work is considered very strong both in terms of its visual composition and the subtle ideas behind it.
Sucheta’s woodcut prints display the serene narrative of her inner thoughts. She recalls a childhood full of village memories. The dark colors of her native soil and the vast span of the Krishna River filled her mind with the sublimity of nature’s overpowering influence. The deep silence of black soil and the pensive glow of river water entered her mind and weaved their forms; thus dark blue and light blue are the words in her work. In her prints she tries to create a soul-searching depth. Her forms with pointed triangles, thin lines and thick streams with their flow and disruption, gives you a feeling that you looking on a transparent piece of glass having soft reflections of abstract forms, submerged in light water. Flow in her forms can be defined as a continuous stream of past memories and disruption shows the loss of something which we valued in our innocence both of which she experienced when she shifted to the city of Satara for her studies, finding city life depressingly lonely and its people struggling for direction. Alienation from nature has always proven catastrophic for human beings as it creates dichotomies in our mind and threatens the notion of faith and unity of being in nature. In Sucheta’s work one can see the abstract visions of lost memories and her futile search for an imaginative world.
