In the hierarchy of subject matter in art, landscape painting was not considered significant in an arts oeuvre. But now it is regarded as a separate genre or category in art. This landscapes that explore the essence of nature becomes a language of self-expression as well as ideology. Sudhangsu as a landscape painter finds himself attracted to remote spectacular and historically charged landscape. Not only historical but his every painting conveys a dramatic view that is more romantic. Once he finds his subject matter, he renders it with a combination of raw energy and savvy intelligence that allows him to simplify and clarify his vision of world without loosing the physical sense of excitement of being in the field. Despite of geographic isolation of many of his subject, however, Sudhangsu experimented with his work. “I want to freeze these moments. It is not just reproducing what the necked eyes see. It was watching, understanding and then getting close enough to get the story. And this story I am trying to tell with grays which has reached a certain height”.
Landscape painting as a separate genre came to India through artist travelers during the process of colonization of sub-continent in 17th century. Imperial conquest of geographical space and it’s inescapable relation to the genre of landscape painting is well documented discourse but it sets up an interesting point of departure for us to examine the works of landscape artists like Sudhangsu. The various forms of open Nature become a powerful instrument in the evolution of his work.
Sudhangsu creates dynamic landscapes with element of realism and abstraction. He is well aware of benefits and drawback that came with being a painter of landscape. In an attempt to assert the anatomy of the art work and based on appeal on it’s ‘Surface effects’ painter like Sudhangsu travelled widely in search of spiritual communication with nature. The compelling image of the artist as an isolated loner in search of life altering experience rushes through most accounts of his personality and his painting as well.
In book of Barbara Whelpton’s ‘Art appreciation’, he defines the beauty of art, to convey, “Few of us can define beauty beyond the pedestrian combination of qualities delighting the eyes, and still fewer use the world with direction… A beautiful landscape painting is usually a painting, irrespective of it’s quality, of a stretch of beautiful countryside, and the qualifying word really states weather the ‘beautiful’ object has been convincingly represented in picture”. In this context, he is not interested in photographic likeness, which is why the painting gives an impression of abstract form. “I am less interested in actual likeness of things in setting up relationship between theme and the background. I paint anything that attracts my attention in some way or the other by shape colour or by some association which to me is significant” the artist has written in his book on his own painting. He treats his any painting like landscape, figurative as a psychic life, hustle and bustle but rather than it’s agglomeration of geometric shapes, volumes, shadows, and colours. Rarely have figurative been depicted as so quite, so inactive, so innocent, and so abstract. They do pray rather than protest. He also combines styles on his canvas with abstract background. Concurrently, if his delineation of shapes can be described as ‘hard-edge’, his handling of paints is often gestural. His interest is in seeking out some special mood or quality, such as changing light or the pattern of rocks and subtle colour variation. Sudhangsu Bandyopadhyay’s work reminds us the categories in art such as realism and abstraction are rather than artificial line demarcation. And his abstract art stresses the actual quality of paintings, colour, and pattern that is most poetic and his work is a kind of dream quality, which is imaginative, but real and appeals emotions.
Sudhangsu is a painter who responds to the spirit of a place by bearing a technique and approach. He uses minimum lines done with colour. His paintings are powerfully executed in broad breezy horizonal strokes with a few lines. He starts with a graphite drawing, laying out the elements of the composition – or he may just start sketching with wash on his canvas. “I don’t have an inflexible approach as to how I go about it”, says the artist. By allowing the subject to dictate the technique, Sudhangsu manages to produce work that varies in weight, density, and palette. He challenges himself to be alive to flexible in approach, generally begging with a broad sketch of composition. He always does not compromise with a single theme whenever he paints something on his canvas. “Even I can rape my canvas”. This very feeling shows his artistic contribution.
The employment of dissonant non-realistic colours and expressionistic stoke can be traced to the Fauvist-expressionist model in European art, where the subject is not reproduced actually, but portrayed to express the heightened emotional and psychological state of artist. “I hope that the painting suggest a certain state of mind”, he says.
Apart from his oil and watercolour, his pestle colour and his colour sketch are done effortlessly. Numerous works in the series of “colour shadow’, ‘reaching out”, “towards Ajanta”, and his very recent work like “fiction and space between” have a structured space images and integrated by ambiguous to pattern. In the opinion of the artist, “I have always tried to find where does the colours in nature begin and how does it go beyond colours. In between my space is born with a new catharsis of colour”.
He uses strong colour – especially red, brown, yellow ochre, black and juxtaposed with white – to depict simplified figure and space. To this, he adds organic and curved lines across the surface which he creates a very successful illusion of motion. There is a great deal of mental action in these painting. The intensity of colour creates an atmosphere that is both rich pregnant personal resonances. This is evident in the artist’s taste for earthly pleasure as seen in dazzling colours and vigorous form. In 1991 – 1995 he had gone to German as an art student with a full scholarship and during that time he was introduced to European art and their uses of colour and how the colour stroke can change the moods of atmosphere. So his uses of colour and lines are close to that of the German Expressionist although he has a great Indian tradition.
Hailing from an artistic family, Sudhangsu has studied painting, sculpture and art history at Kolkata’s Govt. College of Art and Craft before he went to German. He has received numerous national and regional awards for his paintings, including West Bengal State Academy award in oil painting (1990), as well as an award in drawing from S.C.Z.C.C at Nagpur (1998) and he had participated in an auction at Christies (Australia) in 1998. A very successful artist, Sudhangsu’s works were brought by the collectors from London to Germany.
Accordingly, Sudhangsu, award wining oil and pastel colourist who have been teaching art at St.Thomas School in Kolkata. He always tells that a painting is a two-dimensional design, a pattern of interesting shapes of clearly separate values. “If you close your eyes, you will often see all mental vision are abstract” he says. As a result all of his composition develops out of this abstract structure. So his landscape in oil or any medium are built with numerous dabs, swipes and broad stroke of thick paint working out clumps of trees, distant sky, boats on riverbank, fishing nets, rickshaws etc. He abandoned the locality to the visible world, infusing their views with a hunting spirit, an expressive energy that translated the physical stimulus into psychological perception.
At the end we can say any of his compositions illustrate a constant flux between real and surreal, and have an appeal that is sensual and lyrical, almost poetic in flavor.
MITHUN PRAMANIK
Landscape painting as a separate genre came to India through artist travelers during the process of colonization of sub-continent in 17th century. Imperial conquest of geographical space and it’s inescapable relation to the genre of landscape painting is well documented discourse but it sets up an interesting point of departure for us to examine the works of landscape artists like Sudhangsu. The various forms of open Nature become a powerful instrument in the evolution of his work.
Sudhangsu creates dynamic landscapes with element of realism and abstraction. He is well aware of benefits and drawback that came with being a painter of landscape. In an attempt to assert the anatomy of the art work and based on appeal on it’s ‘Surface effects’ painter like Sudhangsu travelled widely in search of spiritual communication with nature. The compelling image of the artist as an isolated loner in search of life altering experience rushes through most accounts of his personality and his painting as well.
In book of Barbara Whelpton’s ‘Art appreciation’, he defines the beauty of art, to convey, “Few of us can define beauty beyond the pedestrian combination of qualities delighting the eyes, and still fewer use the world with direction… A beautiful landscape painting is usually a painting, irrespective of it’s quality, of a stretch of beautiful countryside, and the qualifying word really states weather the ‘beautiful’ object has been convincingly represented in picture”. In this context, he is not interested in photographic likeness, which is why the painting gives an impression of abstract form. “I am less interested in actual likeness of things in setting up relationship between theme and the background. I paint anything that attracts my attention in some way or the other by shape colour or by some association which to me is significant” the artist has written in his book on his own painting. He treats his any painting like landscape, figurative as a psychic life, hustle and bustle but rather than it’s agglomeration of geometric shapes, volumes, shadows, and colours. Rarely have figurative been depicted as so quite, so inactive, so innocent, and so abstract. They do pray rather than protest. He also combines styles on his canvas with abstract background. Concurrently, if his delineation of shapes can be described as ‘hard-edge’, his handling of paints is often gestural. His interest is in seeking out some special mood or quality, such as changing light or the pattern of rocks and subtle colour variation. Sudhangsu Bandyopadhyay’s work reminds us the categories in art such as realism and abstraction are rather than artificial line demarcation. And his abstract art stresses the actual quality of paintings, colour, and pattern that is most poetic and his work is a kind of dream quality, which is imaginative, but real and appeals emotions.
Sudhangsu is a painter who responds to the spirit of a place by bearing a technique and approach. He uses minimum lines done with colour. His paintings are powerfully executed in broad breezy horizonal strokes with a few lines. He starts with a graphite drawing, laying out the elements of the composition – or he may just start sketching with wash on his canvas. “I don’t have an inflexible approach as to how I go about it”, says the artist. By allowing the subject to dictate the technique, Sudhangsu manages to produce work that varies in weight, density, and palette. He challenges himself to be alive to flexible in approach, generally begging with a broad sketch of composition. He always does not compromise with a single theme whenever he paints something on his canvas. “Even I can rape my canvas”. This very feeling shows his artistic contribution.
The employment of dissonant non-realistic colours and expressionistic stoke can be traced to the Fauvist-expressionist model in European art, where the subject is not reproduced actually, but portrayed to express the heightened emotional and psychological state of artist. “I hope that the painting suggest a certain state of mind”, he says.
Apart from his oil and watercolour, his pestle colour and his colour sketch are done effortlessly. Numerous works in the series of “colour shadow’, ‘reaching out”, “towards Ajanta”, and his very recent work like “fiction and space between” have a structured space images and integrated by ambiguous to pattern. In the opinion of the artist, “I have always tried to find where does the colours in nature begin and how does it go beyond colours. In between my space is born with a new catharsis of colour”.
He uses strong colour – especially red, brown, yellow ochre, black and juxtaposed with white – to depict simplified figure and space. To this, he adds organic and curved lines across the surface which he creates a very successful illusion of motion. There is a great deal of mental action in these painting. The intensity of colour creates an atmosphere that is both rich pregnant personal resonances. This is evident in the artist’s taste for earthly pleasure as seen in dazzling colours and vigorous form. In 1991 – 1995 he had gone to German as an art student with a full scholarship and during that time he was introduced to European art and their uses of colour and how the colour stroke can change the moods of atmosphere. So his uses of colour and lines are close to that of the German Expressionist although he has a great Indian tradition.
Hailing from an artistic family, Sudhangsu has studied painting, sculpture and art history at Kolkata’s Govt. College of Art and Craft before he went to German. He has received numerous national and regional awards for his paintings, including West Bengal State Academy award in oil painting (1990), as well as an award in drawing from S.C.Z.C.C at Nagpur (1998) and he had participated in an auction at Christies (Australia) in 1998. A very successful artist, Sudhangsu’s works were brought by the collectors from London to Germany.
Accordingly, Sudhangsu, award wining oil and pastel colourist who have been teaching art at St.Thomas School in Kolkata. He always tells that a painting is a two-dimensional design, a pattern of interesting shapes of clearly separate values. “If you close your eyes, you will often see all mental vision are abstract” he says. As a result all of his composition develops out of this abstract structure. So his landscape in oil or any medium are built with numerous dabs, swipes and broad stroke of thick paint working out clumps of trees, distant sky, boats on riverbank, fishing nets, rickshaws etc. He abandoned the locality to the visible world, infusing their views with a hunting spirit, an expressive energy that translated the physical stimulus into psychological perception.
At the end we can say any of his compositions illustrate a constant flux between real and surreal, and have an appeal that is sensual and lyrical, almost poetic in flavor.
MITHUN PRAMANIK
No comments:
Post a Comment