YOU’RE never too young to show an interest in nature – and to prove the point this week’s Picture of the Week is a stunning photograph taken by 11-year-old Sahasi Upadhya on a family walk at Little Chalfont.
Dad Siddharth is a keen photographer too but says his daughter started showing an interest after seeing him using his camera.
“I have since encouraged her by talking about the basics and left her to experiment on her own,” he says. “She just started off a couple of months ago and has been picking up pace now.”
Says Sahasi: “I had to crouch to take this picture to get the right angle of the sun lighting the clouds and get the right perspective of the subject against the blue sky.”
Sahasi has taken some equally attention-grabbing shots of colourful fungi and foliage on recent outings in Penn Woods using her dad’s Nikon D7000 Dslr.
“A single bit of nature can express so many different things as each person looks at it from different point of view,” she explains. “This is what draws me most to nature.”
Her love of nature is reflected in her art too, where she particularly enjoys Madhubani painting, an Indian art form in which tribal motifs are brought to life with bright colours where nature can often figure prominently.
Siddarth says: “She is drawn to the colours and the flexibility the art form offers, from doing simple motifs to intermediate and very intricate ones.”
Madhubani art incorporates set motifs and symbols, but each artist will have a unique individual approach to these.
“The peacock is a common motif in Madhubani paintings and this one is Sahasi’s take on it,” Siddarth explains.
The paintings were traditionally done on freshly plastered mud walls and floors of huts in the Mithila region of India, with villagers around Madhubani later creating them on cloth, paper and canvas using colours derived from plants.
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