Take a nap for a night at Bhurtel’s three-storey house in Nagdhunga, and what you see from the windowshield after you wake up the next morning is unbelievable to your eyes. For a connoisseur of art, you are in the house of an artist who provides a 3D of Mt Machhapucchre that turns into gold.

It is a kind of an optical illusion which is common in every Pokhara household that you tend to touch the protruding Machhapucchre but to get the view amidst the tireless works of an artist, it becomes more special. The picturesque settings of Pokhara has lured millions of tourists to the city and the paintings from Bhurtel is one of the unnoticed attractions that seldom goes through any promotion or advertisement.

Bhurtel has been the real son of Pokhara whose works have been the asset for its dwellers. While the street vendors are pictured holding his paintings for domestic and foreign tourists, the city tour passengers also get the glimpses of his art in different corners of Pokhara. He is a commercially hit painter of the city who not only earned his living but also built his family a shelter and gave education to his three sons and two daughters.

Bhurtel, who was bestowed with National Talent Prize 18 years back, has several features in his painting and he is not afraid to proclaim that he worships semi-nudity in his works. Depicting semi-nudity in his works has two reasons — one artistic and the other socialistic. "To an eye of a beholder, there lies a huge amount of curiosity when he gets partial glimpse of a snow-white mountain," Bhurtel elaborates as an artist.

"I consider complete nudity as an insanity. It provides no thrill to the one who sees it. The more curiosity is added when one gets to watch a semi-nude woman who gets wet. This is what I want to portray through an art. Its my way of presenting nature in a twisted way," said Bhurtel as he points out a canvas that pictures a Nepali women drenched in water playing sarangi with her clothes loosening up to expose her breast.

His socialist view of presenting semi-nudity is extremely sarcastic to the society we exist in. He seems to exposing an-exposed society. "I see everything nude. The country and the world is nude. The politics, society and people here are nude. The society is a costume designed by the conspirators. People don’t get civilised by wearing clothes."

Bhurtel took a bold step of putting a solo exhibition of nude art in Kathmandu in 2000 only to be bitterly rewarded by the media. The media in Kathmandu defamed Bhurtel for promoting nudity but he remained adamant. "If the newspapers and TV can promote nudity, how can my works that have come out of canvas and colours can be obscenity. Colours and canvas are never obscene," Bhurtel, who was branded shameless by a lot of women who had thronged into his exhibition, said.

Although nudity has pulled Bhurtel into a series of controversy which undoubtedly a reason for recognition, people from different walks of life have also lauded him his abstract art. His abstract art carries a peculiar way of projection with canvas or acrylic colours not required. His art can come from anything handy that comes from him.

"I don’t necessarily require canvas or acrylic colours. Art can come in any form for me through any medium. If I feel that I should start promptly, I pick up anything that is around me. Even a puff of dust could be a medium for me, or a single stick of a broom or scatter pieces of papers. A lot of people are amused by the way how I work but that is my style of work. More than the materials that have been used, its the art that has to be respected. This is how I have been respecting art," said Bhurtel.

"A lot of people come to me who want to make portrait of their forefathers. I make the portrait through the little details provided by them and looking at their generation. It has always worked," said Bhurtel who strongly believes the portrait of Nepal’s first poet Bhanubhakta Acharya was wrongly established.

"Bhanubhakta has not been given a face according to the place he belongs — Tanahun in West Nepal — but we cannot rule it out now. I once came up with the idea on how he looks like. I refrained from working on it because the portrait has already been set in people’s mind. One can easily set that portrait when Bhanubhakta is spelled."

"When I went to Hiroshima, I noticed that the Japanese people turned into the most polite people in the world after the ‘Little Boy’ (a name given to one of the two atom bombs that destroyed the two Japanese cities for many years) landed there. Unfortunately, we are living in a country where people are not ready to repent. We only live to complete the revenge," adds Bhurtel.

Bhurtel has lived as an artist who not only made mark as a bold painter who never backed down from his works but also as a human who never compromised with the situations for self. Carrying a lengthy history of painting, Bhurtel has barely hit the mainstream living most of his life in seclusion. But as time progresses, his works which have been scattered all over the world will loudly scream about a legacy that comes from the smallest cities of Nepal.