"Simply Suhas..." an exhibition of artworks by Suhas Roy at Open Palm Court Gallery, IHC, Lodhi Road > 10am-8pm on 7th-14th December 2010

Time : 10:00 am - 8:00 pm

Entry : Free

Place : Open Palm Court Gallery, India Habitat Centre ( IHC ), Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003
Parking : Gate No. 1 to 3 ( Cars ), Gate No. 2 ( Bikes & Bicycles )

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Event Details : 'Simply Suhas...' an exhibition of artworks by Suhas Roy.

Many of the works mounted in the exhibition to be held in Open Palm Court gallery, India Habitat centre, New Delhi this December are Not for Sale. Evidently, the purpose of the show is not profit but to hold up the totality of the artist named Suhas Roy – his transformation, his diversity, his skilfulness. Sketches in Western Academic style, graphics, landscapes; Crow, Jesus, Radha; aluminium paint on glass, acrylic on paper, egg tempera on canvas – where do we start? Where did he? There’s a story at every turn in the journey, so let’s start at the very beginning.
A little boy in Tejgaon, now in Bangladesh, lost his father when he was only a year and half old. One Kaji Saheb, who taught geography in the village school and doubled as the art teacher, took him under his wings. If the boy learnt to outline India on the blackboard, he could also draws papayas and brinjals. And everything he drew scored 10 on 10. “It seems you’ll grow up to be an artist!” the teacher would say.
The boy loved to spend all his hours drawing and fishing. “How will these pleasures serve you in life?” the elders in the family would admonish him. The youth smiled in reply and went on to join the Indian Art College, studied new methods of printmaking under Somenath Hore and S W Hayter, visited Paris and Florence to study Michelangelo’s David and Pieta, became a Painting teacher and joined Santiniketan… The lush green environs, the ponds and rivulets, the chirping birds and rustic villagers took him back to the childhood haven snatched away by the politics of religion. Suhas Roy, raised in the British Academic mood, riding the high tide of Modernism, debating whether to go Abstract or Semi-Abstract, started painting landscapes.
Yes, landscapes. Trees, birds, mountains, Suhas Roy painted them all, in flat dimensions. He painted elements identified with the genre but rather than borrow from Constable’s Countryside or Monet’s Lilies he looked at the overgrowth of shaluk and paancowrie in Bengal’s backwaters, its ducks, storks and crows.
“Santiniketan gave back the opportunity to go fishing as I did in East Bengal, and I rediscovered the beauty and calming effect of Nature. It came as a relief to me, burdened as I was with the constant thought of ‘What to paint?’ Nature constantly changes. Besides, I found that appreciation of beauty is not confined to a class or profession – a doctor and a poet alike loves flowers. So I decided to go back to landscape, taking no note of whether it was in fashion or out, whether people will take it or not.”
The Crow series became his signature in the ‘70s. The scavenger was an attraction because of its black feathers. Japanese watercolourist Taikan had come to 20th century Bengal with Okakura and helped Abanindranath Tagore master the medium. He’d done a black-n-white series on Mount Fuji. Chancing upon it in the Santiniketan library, Suhas Roy was so impressed as to reach for the austere palette. The crow readily lent itself to the scheme. In a departure from the practice in the medium, Suhas Roy would spray the canvas with acrylic paint beore construing the image in watercolour. Then he’d use a Japanese colour stick to create tones and dimensions. The Far Eastern concept of an object in a wide, open space came to be highly appreciated and widely collected, including by Karan Singh.
For 10 years Suhas Roy kept doing landscapes. When he tired of that, his imagination sought out tribal girls. It was a natural progression, for women – especially tribal – have a symbolic if not symbiotic link with trees. Often he’d counterpoise a tree with a woman. Taru, he titled one of these done in a workshop Suruchi Chand organised for Hudco. From woman in a landscape to Radha was just one step. When Gallery 88 held an exhibition on Krishna, Suhas Roy played with the concept of the Blue God being the Ultimate Being, melding Purush and Prakriti. His canvas thus sported a nude woman against a dark blue background. The title? ‘Radha.’ It not only sold for an enviable sum, it set in motion an astonishing demand for the image that shows no signs of abating.
Suhas Roy has been criticised for continuing to feed the appetite for Radha – but the master is far from apologetic. It is the very definition of icons, he points out: images of personalities deified by popular imagination – be they mythical, historical or social - are repeated again and again, generation after generation, in different styles and contexts. If one age worshipped them as bronze figurines and gold paintings, another flaunted them in oleographs and calendars. It has been so with Radha-Krishna, Ram-Sita, Buddha Jesus, even Gandhi Tagore and Teresa.
Jesus, however, entered Suhas Roy’s world long before Radha. Sometime in 1969 he visited Florence to see David. He found the sculpture epitomising masculine beauty “too proportionate,” and wandered into the church next door preserving Dante’s Divine Comedy in parchment. There, in one corner, he saw the last work of Michelangelo - an unfinished Pieta. Such infinite pathos! The artist couldn’t brush it off his memory even after he returned to Calcutta and one day its picture postcard inspired him to paint a Jesus. When he stopped, the canvas was sporting a contemporary pieta – Jesus without the head, his body descending from the heavens.
As a persona Suhas Roy has deep regards for Jesus. That is why such immense love, even when tinged with sorrow, pain or sadness, flows out of his veins. This prompted even Vatican to acquire his Jesus in 2006.
At some point in 1980s the artist found joy in glass painting. K G Subramanian had returned from Baroda to Santiniketan. For one Kala Mela he urged everybody to revive the ancient Indian tradition. Having earlier done some commercial work in the medium, Suhas decided to try enamel colours on glass. It lent a beautiful texture, and the tantalising outcome was acquired in bulk by Mahendra Jain of Delhi’s Dhoomimal Gallery.
Rigidity, clearly, is a word unknown to Suhas. The changes have come spontaneously, and a good result has goaded him on. He has dwelt on a theme only until he’d besieged by another creative urge that could come in Khajuraho, or Turkey. Never shy of experimenting, his foremost concern has been meticulous quality. His temperas have, then, egg yolk with oil and Japanese porcelain; gelatine with resin and tamarind seed. If it imparts a finer texture to details, he will use a watercolour brush for oil paintings. For, he believes, “Good art will never lose its demand just as diamond will never lose its market.”
Does this imply that Suhas Roy exists in an ivory tower away from social realities? No, the septuagenarian has “never run away from it.” Witness the Disaster series that followed a flash flood in Ilam Bazar. On one of his fishing ventures Suhas witnessed dead bodies being fished out of water! Haunted by the image, he painted the series showing landscape with shrouded bodies.
Indeed, ever since the Naxalite period gave rise to despondency, the artist has been “constantly haunted” by social reality. “But I realise, every turmoil, social or political – including Singur - will be shortlived. Documentation, including in contemporary art, will then be shortlived. Only when it transcends here-and-now can art have lasting value. I therefore focus on what has lasting appeal. Flowers blossom in the same fields that are crushed by battling soldiers. I will speak of the war through the Buddha who transcended war.”
Small wonder, a collector tells Suhas Roy:
“When I’m tossed and tired of problems, I look at your paintings. They act like balms.”

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