The Purushottam Public Trust Scholarships
SCHOLARSHIPS
As an important form of Contemporary and Modern Art, Graphic Printmaking is unique and exhaustive, expensive and laborious to practice. The Purushottam Annual Merit Award for Printmaking encourages artists to continue this art form through monetary support as well as offering a platform for them to showcase their work. We hope to play a small role by helping talented budding artists, especially print-makers. The core objective is to provide initial momentum to a deserving artist as he/she leaves the cocooned existence of a university and embarks on a professional journey.
One of the main initiatives of the Trust is, therefore, to offer scholarships to new talent in the filed of print making, and we offer scholarships and a platform for exposure to them.
In alignment with this, every year, since 2014, the Purushottam Public Trust has awarded an annual merit award to a student in the field of print-making.
This is executed under the aegis of the Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts and the Head of the Department of Graphics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Gujarat - the premier institution of contemporary Indian art in the country. This annual merit award is conferred on the student securing highest marks in the final examinations of the Graphic Arts Course (Practical). The awardee receives a monetary award of Rupees One Lac, as well as the opportunity to showcase his/her works at the end of the year at a premier art gallery in Vadodara.
The Purushottam Public Trust awarded its Annual Merit Scholarship for the year 2022 to Rokesh Patil.
2019 Diploma in Painting, L S Raheja School of Art, Mumbai
2021 M.V.A in Printmaking, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda
Raised on Arnala Island in Maharashtra, Patil's deep-rooted connection to the sea resonates powerfully throughout his work. As a member of the Koli fishing community, he draws from a rich well of cultural memory and personal experience, revisiting the rhythms and rituals of coastal life in both subject and technique. His works, ranging from color intaglio prints to paper mache, metal and wooden sculptures, reflect a sensitive engagement with the marine world, seen not only as a landscape but as a lived space filled with history and resilience.
His treatment of material, especially in drypoint and in his sculptures, echoes the care, precision, and preparation parallel and inherent to the Kharidi period. The distinctive approach to printmaking, particularly his self-developed technique for building colour matrices, underscores both technical finesse and conceptual depth in his work. Though the artist is now based in Baroda and distanced from the sea, his practice continues to be shaped by memories of coastal life – boats, nets, submerged forms, translated through subtle marks and textured surfaces.
From Ocean’s Edge to Wall offered viewers a window into this practice that is both personal and deeply reflective of a larger cultural narrative, a dialogue on the lives and the occupations of communities much like his, that sustain societies in important ways and are yet largely ignored – oftentimes the first to be affected by the backlash of modern progress, with changes in climate, encroaching of their land and the waters that are their livelihood.
Rokesh Patil’s work stands as a compelling testament to how tradition, memory, and technique can intertwine to produce a resonant contemporary voice in printmaking.
Click HERE to download his resume.