Jayashree Chakravarty was born in the year 1956 and did her schooling in Tripura. She was a student of zoology. She went to Shantiniketan, joined the Baroda College of Art and later attended L`Ecole des Beaux Arts in the south of France. Jayashree Chakravarty was educated at Shantiniketan and graduated in Fine Arts from the Viswa Bharati University, Shantiniketan, in the year 1978 and obtained a post-graduate diploma from M.S.University, Baroda, in 1980. In 1982 she received a Canadian grant to study art. She later migrated to France and married a French flautist.
According to Jayashree Chakravarty her paintings are "like a personal diary of my days in France and the influences." Jayashree has developed her own personal style and her inspiration has been the French impressionists and Byzantine mosaic design. It has been commented by various artists that her paintings are autobiographical. "I have been able to reach out to those who have little to do with my personal life," she points out, "and make them identify with my deeply felt imagery." She positions herself in her works as a spontaneous, instinctive woman who is a muse and an eternal child rolled into one.
According to Chakravarty her paintings either ink on paper or oils or have the feel of a dream. She considers that horizons of her imagination have expanded as she is able to relate to human beings of a distant country and has forced certain pre-conceived images to change. She uses superimposed forms. Her imagery reflects the present mood of the world which is a fluid in itself. Her works reflect the unity of man with nature at a conventional and figurative level. Dogs, waves and serried crescent shapes motifs constantly recur in her paintings. Each of her canvas embraces the entire gamut of colors ranging from blues to purple.
She has exhibited her works across India and Sweden. She won an award in 1988 in the II Bharat Bhavan Bienniale Bhopal. Her work is detailed, painstaking and full of stories, memories, and images from childhood, from her travels and her schooling in India and France. She works with a multi-faceted vague visual language teeming with detail and peculiarities. This language is based on personal experience and images from her childhood days.
Chakravarty borrows the subject of paintings from nature, cartography and geology. Her work explores how human beings and the world are the result of an accumulation of memories about past events. It investigates how everything is determined by past, present, and future.
