ANJOLIE ELA MENON (1940)

Often called 'India's first female painter to attract a hub of publicity', Anjolie Ela Menon is also at the helm of meticulous collections of Indian contemporary art. Her oil-painting technique that resembled the master-painters had never stopped her from experimenting through the four decades she has painted. Iconography, for Menon, has no bounds. From Tibetan prayer flags to a street-portait, an old windo or chair to a Murano glass, her visual vocabulary is varied and vivid.

VRINDAVAN SOLANKI (1940-)

Thin, short, rapid lines make Vrindavan Solanki's image. The faceless portraits full with detailed personalization and cityscapes that have a face of their own, make their presence felf on the canvas and cansson paper. Solanki's technique that makes acrylics on canvas look like pen and ink , is well-rehersed. Beyound this, he has also worked with pastels and explored the delights of the colourful city life.



JATIN DAS (1941-)

He's gone places with his line and his sesuous geometry. While his oils on canvas and murals re-cast the Indian narratives, his drawings with ink, charcoal and pencils have revitalised the 'shringar'in Indian art. Jatin Das, now in his late sixties, has not lost his playful strokes.


ACHUTAN KUDDALLUR (1944-)

Layers of compelling, rustic strokes, one after aonther. Layers thatdon't cover, but reveal the inner world. They transform energies from dark to bright. Achutan Kuddallur is not a colourist, nor is he a good designer, though he has qualities of both! He is rather a romantic philosopher. What elevates his work is his romance with the canvas and contemplative drawing with his brush.



KASHINATH SALVE(1944-)

Kashinath Salve's still life have some connection with his earlier abstract landscapes. His focre is now focused, and his mind sees more complex connotations of otherwise mundane things. Salve, who's seen the heyday and decline of a major art institution, also knows the value of craft.



REKHA RAO(1947-)

Keeping influences away, Rekha Rao turned to her own self and has achieved it. In the process, she delved into the everyday experience and its visual traces on mind. Her work started with a poetic imagery, and during the last decade, she has remarkedly shown a labyrinth of the persoanl as well as the political, the public experince.

DILIP RANADE

Imaginative, not imaginary. Precise and pertinent. That's why his pictures pinch. He paints a world of things, and invokes thoughts. With his deep study of art history and Museology, there is a stram of keen observation that makes his work appeal to a commoner and a connoisseur alike.

YASHWANT SHIRWADKAR

Amused by India's date with the past, allured by the colours of her culture, Yashwant Shirwadkar paints scenes from Benares or Rajasthan. His impressionist brushwork bathes these scenes in bright yellow sunlight.

ANIL NAIK

Portrait-painting is Anil Naik's second language. His paintings are his own readings on human life. They speak this language fluently, and expressively. With an ingenious use of imagery, he elevates the experience of a portrait to that of a picture. Naik's study of the Western canon of portaiture from renaissance to pop and beyond, make the backdrop for his experimentation within the academic, 'JJ School' style.

Shibu natesan

Light does not make delusions, they are with the viewer. Light spreads evenly on humans and object alike. So does Shibu Natsan, with his passion for light and detached rendering of the figure. His pictures often take a photographic reference of a human image that has a strong, ever-lasting presence. Shibu deconstructs the photograph with his analytical skill . He does not negate the human factor, he just freezes it into a light that fascinats him.

SANTOSH KSHIRSAGAR

His study and understanding of calligraphy has grown out of sheer artistic passion for the letter-form. When he paints, he transforms it. Alphabet is not a literal signifier then, but a picture. There is dance, there is an element of spacial art in his work. Whenever Santosh Kshirsagar has painted a big work that sprawls several metres, even a bystander is amazed and touched by the performance that unfolds and the zen that works.


TV Santosh

His airbrush re-tells stories of a culture that was had a physical, visible presence. His pictures, though, would be seen in context of the metaculture of visuals, false and true. He sets aside the usually acceptible, so-called 'painterly' renderings and prefers a film-like finesse; perhaps to amplify the frustrations of a contemporary painter.


Arunanshu Chowdhury


Figurative and structured, his narratives are personal notes that address the public mind. His dreamlike backgrounds are studded with images that are seemingly simple, and he takes on to captivate a complex experience. His experience as a father of a boy, led him to an unpretentiously new subject for a male artist.






Puja Iranna

Growing up in a family of painters and architects challenged her to have her own visual language. She met it with her high EQ (emotional quotient). The result is her body of work that addresses the problems in abstraction, visual studies and picture-making! A sketch, a photograph or a digital deconsrtuction becomes her expression. Although her images come from architecture, the Music within wins over their geometry.



Rajan Fulari

A printmaker by choice, his abilities to mend technique have been appreciated over time. A mid-career artist now, Rajan Fulari deals with issues like religious conditioning and catastrophes. Rajan, who loves the world and its people, hardly needs any verbose justification for his work.

Shankar Sonavne,

His poise as an artist is as noteworthy as his tenacity. Shankar Soanvne's austerity with paint, his communicative images and occasional use of collage, will definitely be remebered.


Sejal Kshirsagar

A post- abstract- expressionist mode is a difficult terrain. Most practicitoners of this mode become refugees of minmalism. Sejal Kshirsagar refuses such refuge, and reverts to drawing. Innocent lines that flow fearlessly have made pathways in her picture-plane. Her concern is for the fragments of existence, that usually go unread, unnoticed.


Chintan Upadhyay

A brat in his art-school days, Chintan daringly addressed the visual cultures that were a taboo in India. A more sophisticated intervention by him came later. Chintan, in his recent work, destructures the Indian Miniature paintings by using them as a skin for the digital-age cyborg-like humans. Designer babies, his recent body of work, also articulated the post-biotech issues.

Pradeep Mishra.

He wants real people; and not the habituated 'art public' to see his work. Sensing the suffocation and staleness in the air, Pradeep Mishra, a young post-graduate from JJ school of art, tries to infuse new breath in it. Pradeep, who just finished is journey from extrovert pastiche to introvert imagery, is now conscious about the signified.

SANJEEV SONPIMPARE (1969-)

Sanjeev, with his keen interest in the paradoxes and dissonaces of life - here and now- believes in a conceptual consistency of the eternal. Clarity of Thought and action guides his creativity. His recent works speak about the predicament of the city life.

RIYAS KOMU (1971-)

Committment to humanity has driven Komu to observe life. While his works as a student at the JJ School of Art had a strong and often direct political content, his paintings now point to a global reality of opresseion and resistance. Life flows, and so flows history. Komu in his role as an iconographer of Human Life, also makes exellent use of signage. His recourse to Brügel or his quest for Ravi Varma has been seen occasionaly in his works, but clearly, his grasp of history is not occasional.

MEERA DEVIDAYAL (1947)

With an unpretentious understanding of the commoners' lives and aspirations, Meera Devidayal paints desires and histories, she immortalises the ephemeral. Driving further from collages and assemblages, she composes her paintings in a joyful, unpredictable way. As a woman of substance, her observations and apprehensions about women and society are indivisible from her emotional responses.

GOGI SAROJ PAL
An iconographer of womanhood, Gogi Saroj Pal narrates 'Herstory' in a completely non-narrative idiom. The singular, tenacious, often half-human and fantasy-like figure in Gogi's work shows the multi-dimensionality of being a woman. There is a playful, decorative element in her work, that quandarizes male-centric cannon of art history and cherishes the vernacular, mass-appealing image.

stilllife

stilllife, originally uploaded by abhitamhane.

V A MALI -- STILL LIFE

Several painters complain about being ' curbed', by the commissionedwork. Many more abandon commissions because they restrict theirstyle. Contrary to these beliefs are the works by Vasant Anat Mali,who was commissioned because of his individual style. Mali was knownfor his brushstrokes and impasto, and hardly did he forgo thisidentity of his brush.Some of Mali's contemporaries, mostly his competitors, would call hispaintings 'carpet-like'. Upto the 1940s, when everybody else from theJJ School of art was was more or less following the Academic stylethat had been taught to them, Mali's painting would rather look likea collage of brushstrokes. It was this unmistakable quality of hiswork, pioneering in Bombay, that won him critical acclaim and fame. Hewas also conferred many a prize, because of his distinctive rendering.He employed stark Highlights and darker shadows to enhance hisvigorous strokes, and only where it was necessary to deal with thesoft, reflected light in his work, he would consider softer strokes.Thus, Mali's attempt cannot be said to be deconstructivist; but heshowed and taught the Bombay painter how the power of the brushstrokecould be enhanced and retained. Mali's pallette always had purples,mauves, pinks and sometime blues. Yellow came, to balance these cyansand magentas.The work, a Still life with carrots, has all these qualities of aMali. The drapes have those signature strokes once enviously dubbed'carpet-like'. A single source of primary light, perhaps the natural(Indian!) sunlight, has its marks with the bold white patches. Sobright is the light that the lines on the glass have their individual play of competing dualities of textures, also in the enamel white plate with a shadow of the knife and the the earthen pot that glows with its 'desi' glaze. The carrots and a coconut, because of their non-reflective textures, are rendered with a different strategy. The darker drapes alongside the wine bottle succeed in adding drama to this still-life, and the stage is set for the carrots, with scene one- the bright pink, and scene two- a pale, dull purple. Mali, better known as a portrait painter, was also famous for his illustrious use of props in his portraits.Take a close look at this still-life, can we call it a 'portrait of an Indian pot ' ?!
– abhijeet tamhane.


posted by abhi at 11:18 AM

AJA VILAP by M V Dhurandhar.

ajavilap, originally uploaded by abhitamhane.

Ravi Varma had entered his twenties when MV Dhurandhar was born. To his credit, Dhurandhar has a distinction to present a "second generation model" of the fine balance between popular commercial art and academic realism that Ravi Varma was known for. In his own right, as a dutiful teacher in the British-run Sir JJ school of Art and also a successful painter, "Raobahadur" Dhurandhar was to impress three generations of artists. His renderings resonate his obsequious persona. Although his use of brush was almost ascetic, he had a princely eye for detail. No wonder this kolhapur-born artist, who
retained his Indian, vernacular values in the same breath as the high English etiquette; refines this very dichotomy when he paints!
Light, in Dhurandhar's paintings, is peculiar. It is flat. The transparency of colour is amplified in the drapes and on faces.
'Aja Vilap' is about the pathos (karuN.-rasa) that occurs when the mythological King Aja weeps and cries at the sudden loss of his consort Indumati. The myth of Indumati, a celestial damsel mandated to live a human life was to be freed only when a celestial garland would fall around her neck, narrated by poet Kalidasa in chapter VIII of his 'Raghuvam.sha', is an archetype of a husband's love for his wife. Aja asks the five elements why they took his beloved away from him. A rare gesture of sentimentality of the Indian warrior-male is epitomized in 'Aja Vilap'. Aja, in the painting, holds the garland in his left hand as he is looking with a startled face toward the heavenly powers that have made Indumati lifeless. Their clothes show how unaware the loving couple was of the worldy fears, and the marble architecture in the painting is clearly an addition by Dhurandhar. Use of architecture to show the princely grandeur was essentially a colonial concept.
There is an autobiographical reference to this work by Dhurandhar: the artist's first wife had passed away at an early age.

-- Abhijeet Tamhane