Exploring The Medium
M.E.C. Art Gallery, New Delhi
Monday, October 05, 1992

Over the past two decades acrylic, the aqueous medium, has lent itself to a wide range of use by painters, often replacing the oil. The transparent watercolour is not pliable for the slap-dab, thick impasto technique, nor is the opaque gouache, another aqueous medium, capable of retaining the kind of thickness the painters want for speedy gestural brushwork. The varying thickness of acrylic paint can create a lively pattern of surface tension parallel to colours and their varying values. It looks very much like the oil paint, only much cheaper. Some painters can achieve highly consistent and uniform colour filed with acrylic, which is not that easy in transparent watercolour, and gouache will often leave marks of the brush bristle. That is another extreme of the use of acrylic colours.

The 40 medium-small size acrylic landscapes of Animesh Roy, now on view at the M.E.C. Art Gallery, 70B, Khan Market, show the young painter’s control over the medium, and his profound concern for the effects of light on nature. He has titled the present series — his first solo show in the Capital — ‘On the Roads’, and most of the landscapes were painted on location: The deep woodlands, the forest path lighted up by the sunlight seeping through the leaves of tall trees, the dramatic diagonals of dipping slope sheltering a few wild flowers, the rough stone boulders, and sometimes little towns on mountain tops. Animesh brings in lively linear patterns of light, which also define the undulating topography of the land, with the butt-end of the brush, displacing the thick layer of paints — a very familiar technique even with artists who paint in transparent water colour or in oil.

What is important in the landscapes is the total avoidance of any photographic references which we often note with dismay even in paintings of highly rated watercolourists. He paints with a breezy brush, loaded with thick paint catching the ephemeral poetry of colour and light through changing seasons in the woodlands. And he varies the direction of brush, sometimes in quick diagonals which mix grey, blue and black only to throw up the fleeting colours of wild flowers in hasty horizontals making the landscape almost semi-abstract. Evidently he is still exploring the pictorial poetry of the inspired impressionists. But in some paintings, of instance, the Red Road and Sunlit Path, his treatment of colours shows the early expressionist painters’ mystic awareness of colours which often sent out to them signals of deeper psychological import. Strangely, when he paints the familiar geometry of small towns, Animesh seems to be rather heavy-handed, if not ham-handed, in wielding his brush and his perception of colours suddenly focuses on the drab and the insipid.

Santo Datta
The Hindu New Delhi