A work by Ranjan Sarkar

Ranjan Sarkar’s parents died young and he was brought up in an orphanage. But that did not stop him from taking a serious interest in art. A 30-year-old man now, he is employed at YMCA, Wellington, and during his leisure hours he collects the colour pages of magazines and newspapers and cuts them into various sizes and shapes to create his collages.

He has an unerring instinct for picking out just the right scrap of paper that would give his images a sense of volume and solidity. Ranjan is quite adept at creating human figures, particularly buxom ladies straight out of old calendars and prints. With equal expertise he conjures up slums, sea sides, crows with cockroaches in their beaks, Noah’s Ark, Calcutta scenes and hundreds of other images.

If this sounds quite similar to the lifestory of collage artist Shakila, don’t be surprised. Both were picked up and trained by artist B.R. Panesar, who has lived at YMCA, Wellington, ever since he retired from the Indian Statistical Institute.

Under Panesarji’s guidance, Sarkar has already held exhibitions of his work. The latest was at Chitrakoot gallery, where he was able to sell some of his work. This was his first one-man show and he was justifiably excited about it. With the help of a friend Ranjan has created a well-designed site — www.ranjansarkar.blogspot.com — where one can see his collages and even download them.

For some artists the inner life of thoughts, perceptions and contemplation is more real than the cares and worries of this workaday world.

Kashmir Khosa, who is holding his first one-person show in Calcutta at Gallery K2, is one such who seems to be out of touch with harsher realities. Khosa is a Kashmiri Pandit with fine features and a rather rarefied sensibility. In Calcutta after quite some time, he says his father was also an artist who had painted the life of Mahatma Gandhi. He was trained at Delhi College of Art and now divides his time between New Delhi and Himachal Pradesh.

Khosa says he can never paint mechanically and works according to his will, often for long hours, or not at all. When he is not painting he is reading Vedanta, Upanishads and mystic literature. When he is painting, Khosa conjures up astral bodies surrounded by waves and circles of energy. They seem to be in a trance-like state. When he begins to paint, Khosa “starts seeing images I have imbibed. I think of the flat surface of the canvas that I will destroy”. It is easy to discover Blake’s imagery in Khosa’s work but the two are like chalk and cheese. Khosa’s paintings are being exhibited here along with the works of two other artists — Amal Ghosh and Nabanita Javed.

It is indeed surprising that an artist, who had chosen to live in the obscurity of Begumpur village in Hooghly, and had not raised either a finger or his voice to promote himself, is still so well known as Gobardhan Ash.

The artist, who had done several first-rate self-portraits, was born in 1907 and Aakriti Gallery is celebrating his centenary. The artist, who died in 1996, had a long and chequered career. He began his training at the Government School of Art in Calcutta, but moved to Chennai to work under Deviprasad Roy Choudhury.

Discovered by the Progressive Writers’ Group, Ash along with Zainul Abedin painted a series depicting the Bengal famine through stark, uncompromising images of skeletal human beings dying like flies by the wayside. But as this exhibition shows, Ash could never be identified by a single style. He had no trademark. Many of his works were painted in a playful mood when he created doll-like human beings in bright shades of red, pink and yellow, hybrids that vaguely resembled a camel. He did a whole series on spring when trees would burst into red and yellow flames.

More significantly, he distorted — apparently without any effort – the faces of women till they looked as if Jamini Roy visages were melting. With a single stroke of his brush he must have conjured up those women with droopy eyes. The eavesdropping woman tries hard not to miss a single whisper, and her effort is visible in her eyes. Gobardhan Ash had done a series of remarkable pencil sketches. His academic training came in handy when he painted portraits for a living. But he had the courage to break out of the mould again and again.