Continuing his quest to document Ramananda Bandyopadhyay’s life and work, Vinayak Pasricha launched the second book on the artist whose work is typical of the Bengal School of Art. While his previous book, Ramananda: The Lyrical Modern, gave the reader a comprehensive overview of the life and work of the artist, which was thematically segregated, Close Encounters: Ramananda Bandyopadhyay, Selected Drawings presents an important survey of works on paper that traces the artist’s close and lifelong engagement with the medium of drawing throughout his career. By bringing the focus on the artist’s drawings with this new coffee table book, Pasricha has amplified a section of Bandyopadhyay’s oeuvre that deserves to be examined in isolation.
The lines drawn in ink, moving on the canvas to form a body, a scene or a memory, speak of the mastery the man possessed. “The idea of his book came while I was archiving the artist’s work, when I stumbled upon a set of beautiful drawings executed in ink and graphite, some going back to his student days at Santiniketan. Ramananda’s dynamic and sensuous works on paper, forge an immediate and powerful connection with the subject being drawn, where the concept of ‘touch’ pervades these works, distilling the themes of love, life and nature that underscore his art,” shares Pasricha, who fondly calls his mentor ‘Mastermoshai’ and whose work he has grown up admiring.
Close Encounters traces Bandyopadhyay’s visual art practice right from the 1950s to the aught years, and one can watch closely the graph of the artist that takes stride in composition while remaining firm in his mastery of minimal strokes. In an interesting interpretation, Pasricha calls drawings as democracy. Elaborating on his observation, he shares, “For Ramananda, drawing has always formed the central core of his work. His drawings are not just designed to enhance the viewer’s understanding of an event or to underline his own authority as a reliable chronicler. Drawing for him is democracy, because with very inexpensive materials like a pencil or a pen, the artist is able to reveal the elusive qualities of his subjects through the senses of sight and touch. This sense of touch is his most direct and intimate response to the world, deriving from a deep connection with the subject being drawn, through fluid graphite lines or delicate ink strokes.”
The book was launched at RCGC in the presence of G.M. Kapur, Rita Bhimani and Jawhar Sirkar, who have followed Ramananda’s work closely. Though everyone felt the artist’s absence, as he was present during the launch of the first book, Bandyopadhyay’s artwork and his legacy, kept the evening’s spirit high. The silver lining of the launch was the idea of taking Bandopadhyay’s work out of the confines of Calcutta.
Sharing his plans, Pasricha informed, “I am planning an exhibition of his works in Delhi and another in London. It is important to take the artist out of the city, who has largely remained outside the primary national mainstream circuit, leading to a disparity in visibility due to systematic issues.”
Exposing the audience to Bandyopadhyay’s work at a national and global level, while the artist is still alive, will not just draw attention to a gem who has been the protégé of Nandalal Bose and produced hundreds of works, but also put the Bengal School of Art in the limelight.