The landscapes begin with the earliest 1936 study and flow into the series of deep moody blue toned works of China pet sheets manufacturers the Himalayas,” shares Uma and adds, “There are also clear forms of still life studies with birds and flowers and a few rustic sienna studies. He was India’s Wordsworth in colour because his works drew us closer to the beauty and spiritual quality of nature.A collection of iconic works by eminent modernist painter Gopal Ghose in an exhibition titled “Rustic Resonance”, curated by scholar-columnist Uma Nair, features 58 paintings representing the artistic approach and journey of this Kolkata-born artist. “His pastel landscapes takes the viewers on a sojourn of the particular area.”. She says, “These landscapes are important because they have an ecological echo.”Gopal was one of the prominent art teachers of the country, who loved to travel to different places in India while sketching and capturing the different seasons. The collection represents his fascination with the nuances of the landscape, but also draws the viewer into the idea of creating a signature palette of chromatic intensities in colour and tonalities in the texture of nature’s elements. It has a distinct flavour of uniqueness about it.”
Even in today’s world and time, these artworks hold a lot of significance. Each work reflects an ongoing dialogue about the role and the translation in a work of art, rather than the exact representation of the visual world as seen before the human eye. Uma points out, “Gopal Ghose was an itinerant traveller who spent his days sketching and translating landscapes onto sheets of paper. “The show is divided into chronological as well as compositional dictates. The works on display at Kumar Gallery are mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, but there’s also a lone work of 1936 — a study of the Marina Beach, considered one of his masterpiece because of the nuances of colour, tonalities and limpid brushwork.”The pictorial plane unfolds horizontally, extending and transforming into a canvas as Gopal studies the fauna and flora dearly in his paintings. He mastered the art of Chinese work and implemented it with the western technique presenting a creation of perspective beyond the three types defined by the earlier Chinese painters, which are high distance, horizontal distance and deep distance,” states Uma.
