A sign-painting shop from 1983, as digital printing takes the brushwork away

This sign painter in Koyra, Khulna, set up his art shop in front of the upazila council in 1983, at a time when getting a name plate lettered meant travelling 100 km to Khulna city. With nowhere nearby to learn the craft, he had gone about 42 years ago to Kolaroa in Satkhira to train under another artist. After 1983 the name plates of almost every office in the upazila were painted by his hand - nobody else in the local market did the work, and that vacuum was the steady source of it. Digital printing centres have since replaced art shops from the small towns to the cities, and brush-painted banners are close to extinct. Three decades on he still does the work, and from 2013 he began teaching handwriting and drawing in local schools and madrasas, sometimes for a token fee and sometimes for nothing, until Covid stopped that too. He was 63 at the time of the report; no income or capital figures are given.