FEOM THE GALLERY

MYSTIC LIGHT WITHINREALITY                                                     Recent Paintings of Arup Lodh

The Kolkata based young artist Arup Lodh is a very fine and dexterous water-colourist. He is a contemplative painter of cityscape. He loves the city of Kolkata, where he was born in kolkata and passed his childhood, adolescence, and youthful days with dreams of constructing pollutionless ideal city in his own imagination. His paintings are the reflection of that imagination and love. Yet they are very real and naturalistic in form. Meticulous naturalism is very hard to grasp. It requires intimate arduous practice. When it is perfectly executed, it appears very lucid, simple, effortless but not facile. The deeper tune of reality rings through it. It provides a documentary significance, yet surpasses mere documentation. It posits the light of the ideal. In most cases naturalism transcends into idealism. It invests in reality a quintessential beauty and value-system.

The naturalism of Raphael, Titian or Constable, of Daniell, Solvince or James Baily Fraser, of Ravi Varma or Hemendranath Mazumder provides the clue of how naturalism surpasses visible reality and creates a field of the contemplative ideal. The British artists of eighteenth and nineteenth century mentioned above like Daniell, Solvince or James Baily Fraser and others did ample execution of the city of Calcutta that instilled the ideal within the real. Their works till now charms us and help us to know our city of the past. Arup Lodh is a successor of that legacy. He presents the contemporary city with contemplative imagination that, albeit being real, transcends apparent reality to create an ideal expanse providing the clue of how the beauty of the city should appear to us. His paintings show, Arup has been very successful in this project.

His skill in handling water colour has also added to the aesthetic quality of his paintings. He has extended the British legacy of execution in water colour that has come down to the contemporary period through pedagogic system followed particularly in Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta and Indian Art College. The system consists of lying down very confident colour washes one after the other maintaining soft and transparent chromatic shades that dissolves reality and induces a kind of luminous enlightenment. This is how water colour turns to be an ideal medium to play with fantasy oriented reality, where reality providing its basic characteristic transcends into a sonorous melody. Within the visible reality Arup’s cityscapes provide a harmonious serene beauty. His handling of water colour has helped him to arrive at this contemplative execution.

Though water colour is considered as secondary medium, more suitable for sketches and primary drawing for serious painting, our modernity has a long bequest of creative water colours. During its extensive sojourn from pre-modern period of Kalighat painting and Company School, when it reached to Abanindranath it created a stable platform of indigenous modernity. Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Rabindranath himself opened an extensive space for creative water colour, which was then elevated to the ethereal height by Binodbehari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar, MF Husain, Gopal Ghosh and others. Their efforts helped water colour to rise to a major medium that was further perfected by the artists of 1960-s. Shyamal Dutta Roy made it an ideal medium for his socially committed paintings. This constant strife helped water colour to grow into multifaceted technique and form-structure that inspired the artists of 1980-s like Sanjay Bhattacharya, Samir Mondal or Pradip Moitra and others to take it up as their preferred medium

Arup Lodh is a promising young artist, who has created his own identity in water colour within this enlightened inheritance through synthesis of imagination with reality, transcending the real into the ideal. He paints various facets of the city of Kolkata, its architectures, roads, transports, trees, lights and shadows, its pleasures and pains. He shifts from the present day city of strife and turmoil, of violence and death, of rush and aimless running and tries to create a city with serene meditativeness, with contemplative ideal beauty. He paints the city in different time phases, morning, evening, summer and monsoon, delineates diverse faces of its beauty.

     The painting titled ‘Our City in the Morning’, although executed in acrylic on canvas, has an effect of transparent water colour. The morning is quiet and contemplative. A part of ‘maidan’ at Esplanade is visible. The monument stands alone. Two horse carts are on the road. Only two persons are visible at far end of the frontal space. The sky is cloudy. Probably it has rained some times earlier. The cloud reflects the morning light. In the painting ‘Evening at Kolkata’ a blue light has covered the streets and buildings of the city. The traffic and human rush is minimal. A tram is there and a few motor cars. The rest is all peace. The pictorial composition of ‘A Wet Afternoon’ is serene. A moving tram is in the central space. On the two sides of it two vehicles are moving parallel to each other. A yellow light is spread over the entire space bringing out a mystic environment. Mysticism is an exceptional quality in his naturalistic execution that heightens reality into meditative transcendence. Apart from the time and season oriented pictures there are various works that show the running horses in the turf. There are works that look at Kolkata from a bird’s eye view and other faces of the city.

     Apart from cityscapes there are a few works in this show that presents the life in bare reality. ‘Existence’ is a very successful water colour that earned a prestigious award from Bankside Gallery of London. This naturalistically executed work delineates a beggar seated on the road with tattered clothes. In ‘Shelter’ a person is sleeping on the street. In these works he shows his ability to execute bare reality and his sympathy for the life in distress.

Reality and transcendence of reality into the ideal are the two wings of the paintings of Arup Lodh. In both cases he shows his commitment to the life.

                                                                                                                                                              Eminent Art Critic                                                                                                                                   Mrinal Ghos                                                                                                                                Ananda Bazar Patrika.

12 July 2013.