Subrata Ghosh

Subrata Ghosh, the young artist, tries to touch temporality from the perspective of timelessness. The enlightened heritage of Indian classical art inspires him and helps him to build up his own idiom. He looks back towards the grand tradition of our painting and sculpture of classical era. The tranquility with the divinity of the Ajanta figuration and Gupta sculpture makes some imprint in his delineation of form. He imbibes robustness, illusion of three dimensionality from these classical traditional sources and induces a kind of sobriety through duality of light and shade in his figuration. The echo of idyllic elements also reverberates in his works. He also induces decorativeness from traditional sources. The floral elements, rhythmic plants and creepers, flying birds decorate the tranquil faces or figures in his paintings with the message of ideal or divine contemplation. His paintings, especially of this present series, are therefore rare examples of the assimilation of the two opposing trends or attitude to life, that is classicism and romanticism. In tranquility and meditativeness, in depicting the divine values of an enlightened and celebrated culture, in connecting his visual elements with the ‘timelessness’ he imbibes classical sensibility, where as in decorativeness, in transcending dry rationality towards an ethereal emotiveness his works posit a tendency of romanticism. With these elements of ‘timelessness’ he tries to touch or project, albeit very subtly and indirectly, the values of ‘temporality’. To him the time present is a time of strife and discordance, of anarchy and violence, violence towards life also towards nature and environment. His paintings grow out of a rebellion against these decaying values. He tries to posit an ideal to negate this decay, this human frailty that the civilization is engulfed with. He has worked in acrylic on canvas. He applies color layer after layer to arrive at his own chromatic structure, where white with little shade of yellow, cream and light grey gets prominence. This color scheme helps him to create an environment of idyllic tranquility. His subjects are various, mythical, religious and secular expressing various shades of life. In ‘Nirvana’ he depicts the face of Buddha in classical style. In ‘Mahamaya’ he paints in semi-profile the face of the divine lady. ‘Tejaswini’ also reflects the image of Goddess Durga. ‘Eternal Love’ is an image of eternal mother and child where the mother holds on her lap a child with a pachydermic head like Ganesha of Hindu mythology. ‘Silent Love’ is the image of a beautiful lady depicted in idealized naturalistic form seated with a bunch of lotus buds in her hand. ‘Rhythm’ depicts the mythical theme of Radha Krishna. Apart from these myth oriented subjects there are also works of non-mythic category like ‘Boy and Kite’ where the artist depicts the pleasure of a boy while flying the kite as a memory of his own childhood, or the ‘The Owl’, image of the nocturnal bird that flies within the realm of myth and reality.