A lover of the wild, Gopal Ghose portrayed the countryside in a highly individualistic style. He travelled and was particularly taken in by the rural settings in South India. The Calcutta-born artist went on to create some extraordinary landscapes. Scholar and art critic Uma Nair examines the period of 1950s and 1960s in his artistic career. “Rustic Resonance” features 58 paintings collected by Kumars of the Kumar Gallery which is hosting the show.
Uma Nair ruminates on the masterful renditions of Gopal Ghose.
On the ecology on his canvas
Gopal Ghose was an itinerant traveller who spent his days sketching and translating landscapes onto sheets of paper. In an age when development is destroying farmlands and cell phone towers are punctuating the landscape these works stand apart because they reflect the landscape before development invaded it and changed the skyline and the horizon.
These landscapes are important because they have an ecological echo. They have a Wordsworthian signature because they draw us closer to the beauty and spiritual quality of nature.
On the aesthetics
Ghose’s landscapes are different because they have about them a paradisal quality of a holistic fervour. They position him as a lover of nature’s flora and fauna. His renditions are not exact but they have a rare vitality and a chromatic understanding of nature’s facets. He balanced western and eastern understanding with grammar and techniques. For Ghose, the rural landscape was one in which the small labourer Dravidian or otherwise also became a part of the scene. This shows an empathetic being, one who understood the place and role of the labourer in the larger scheme of things. I believe his sensitivity to life and nature and people and the picking out of the thatched roofs and humble dwellings set him apart. I also believe he greatly studied the British Age of watercolours of Constable and others as well as the Chinese landscapes. That is why he was able to blend both ideations into his rural settings.
On the exhibition
The show is divided into chronological as well as compositional dictates. The landscapes begin with the earliest 1936 study and flow into the series of deep moody blue toned works in the Himalayas. There are also clear forms of still life studies with birds and flowers and a few rustic sienna studies. I wanted to create a flow that was seamless and fluid. This is why artist Sudip Roy who visited the show said: “Ghose was like a migrant bird who needed no visa to cross borders, the spirit enters our mind.”
On the focus
This show belongs to the 1950s and 1960s and has a lone work of 1936 — a study of the Marina Beach which is a masterpiece because of the nuances of colour, the tonalities and the limpid brushwork. It stands apart for the fact that it draws attention to the strokes of pastels and compositional flavour of completeness in vision. To create a landscape replete with paddy fields and birds and the atmospherics of the sky in tinsel toned pastels and give us tranquillity in every mood is not something we see often. There are lots of Gopal Ghose collectors in the country one of the finest being Avijit and Piya Mazumder of TIL but I think this collection with the Kumar's is a princely suite because it has a focus of different seasonal patterns and the little nuggets of insight offered is a treasure trove of harmonious experiences. It has a distinct flavour of uniqueness about it. And let’s not forget it was collected over 50 years by the Kumar brothers.
When you look at a suite that belongs to a certain period of 1950s and 1960s you cannot create a story on that score, it wouldn’t be right in terms of art history. My study was of the period and the different things he may have done like studying the Chinese artists understanding of foreground and horizons and palette preferences. I didn’t know Ghose, so I kept my insight, academic and scholarly in terms of what I saw. I didn’t speculate about any movements. I believe that any research should be about what is tangible and not created around fallacies. My research was based on my own love for landscapes seen over 30 years in New York and Washington DC.
(The show “Rustic Resonance” is on at Kumar Gallery, 56, Sunder Nagar, till November 30)
