Images From The City And Woodlands
Triveni Gallery, New Delhi
Friday, July 15, 1994

Animesh Roy’s main focus is on landscapes far away from the city where individuals get lost. His pen-and-ink drawings of miniature size and his paintings in the aqueous mediums like the transparent watercolour and acrylic are now on view at the small Triveni Gallery.

Of all his exhibits, the postcard size drawings with micro-tipped pen are perhaps the best. In fact, they stand apart from his other works for their simple but sure-handed linearity and a fine sense of design. For instance, in the drawings of small mountain villages, the narrow, meandering rustic lanes between the tin-shaded cottages show a quiet milieu of intimate domesticity, all seen from a height. The diminutive human forms make the white of the lanes alive, particularly when deep, hard-lined shades of the roof-tops frame them from different sides. In these drawings Animesh avoids detailed suggestion of the grandeur of the mountains. It is the restrained human measure that makes his mountain scenes attractive.

In the other paintings in mixed media, Animesh seems to be going through a restless phase of transition. His earlier proficiency in painting landscapes in transparent watercolour, detailing sharp breaks in shaded and lighted areas are gradually moving towards an abstracted expression of forms and colours in the landscapes. In a predominantly green landscape the young artist uses breezy brushwork charged with acrylic paint, and the whole scene is given a stormy diagonal movement. Pleasing no doubt, but in other paintings on high-grained hand-made paper he lapses into amorphous mix of transparent paint-smudges on the wet paper surface, depending more on the happy accidents that usually take place when the brush is heavy with watery paint and the paper is already wet.

What we see in his miniature-size drawing is slowly getting lost in his ardour of ‘modernisation’ and modish ‘abstraction’. The point of my detailing this kind of inconsistency is to bring home to the artist that he must not follow what other artists are doing for painting ‘modern landscapes’. Only when his own perception of world around him will change, his technique will also change if he goes on working and being truthful to his subjective response to the scene.

Santo Datta
The Hindu New Delhi