For Sankha Banerjee, drawing is not merely a practice of improving draftsmanship—it is a way of understanding people. His daily sketchbooks, many of them created while travelling through railway stations and suburban trains, form an ongoing archive of ordinary lives. Commuters waiting in silence, labourers resting between journeys, elderly faces marked by time, children asleep on platforms, and fleeting encounters with strangers become the foundation of his visual vocabulary. Executed rapidly in pen,
these drawings privilege observation over perfection. A few confident lines are enough to reveal posture, fatigue, tenderness, anxiety, or resilience. Rather than describing every detail, Banerjee searches for the emotional weight carried by a gesture—the bend of a shoulder, the tilt of a head, or the quiet stillness of someone lost in thought. The economy of line allows each figure to retain its immediacy, preserving the spontaneity of the moment before it disappears.
These sketchbooks are more than travel journals; they are laboratories for character and narrative. The faces and bodies encountered in everyday life often reappear, transformed, in Banerjee's paintings, graphic novels, and installations. Mythological heroes, historical figures, and fictional protagonists are rooted in the expressions of real people observed in public spaces. This constant dialogue between observation and imagination gives his larger works a rare sense of humanity and psychological depth.
Working almost every day, Banerjee has developed a line that is instinctive, expressive, and deeply empathetic. The sketches reveal an artist who believes that drawing is an act of attention—a way of acknowledging lives that often remain unseen. Railway stations, with their endless movement, waiting, departures, and reunions, become an open studio where the ordinary is transformed into visual memory.
These drawings stand as independent works in their own right, while also serving as the invisible foundation of Sankha Banerjee's broader artistic practice. Every line records not only a figure, but a fleeting human presence, preserving the quiet poetry of everyday existence.
