Sanjay Ashtaputre Biography 
Sanjay Ashtaputre is an Indian artist and painter of modern period of art world. He is also a sitar artist. He worked as an illustrator at an ad agency, then started his own ad agency and took music and art as fulltime profession. He has been influenced by great legends like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi for being positive in life. Van Gogh and Picasso, and their lives inspired him a lot in the field of art.
Ashtaputre is a Maharashtrian. He studied at GD Art, Government School of Art of Aurangabad. Later he started off his career as an illustrator in an ad agency and came to Hyderabad. Though he wanted to move to Mumbai soon after his art studies, his parents wanted to gain him some experience, and sent him to his cousin in Hyderabad. It was year 1978 and when he reached Hyderabad for the first time, the only language he was fluent was his mother tongue Marathi, apart from a little Hindi and English. At that time Hyderabad was a hub of many ad agencies, and many of them are closed now. He married his junior at college, Daya who is a skilled photographer too.
He worked as an illustrator to his art director of his ad agency. But he couldn’t stay after five or six months. Then he worked as a freelancer for five to six years. He worked with illustrations of commercial ads, screen printing and signboards for his livelihood. He also painted portraits and did restoration work of old paintings. Ashtaputre started off with figurative paintings and held his first exhibition at Koratkar Art Gallery, Nampally (Hyderabad) in 1985, followed by another one at Kalamandir, Begumpet.
It began a series of art exhibitions. Couple series (2010) is one of his noted works in the recent times. He lost his son in the year 2000 and couldn’t paint for the next five years. The couple loves both Hindustani classical and old film music, and they start their daily routine listening to music at 6.30 am. He dabbled with different media in his long innings, and his works are his expressions of thoughts. Ashtaputre did a charcoal series titled ‘Malkauns’ in 2007 named after Hindustani rag Malkauns.
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Updated: June 26, 2016
