Like every
artist, Ganesh Pyne must have painted numerous works, I haven’t seen all. My
opinion below are for the major ones I have seen , either as prints or in
original.
Ganesh
Pyne for quite some time has been my favorite painter from Bengal. To me he is
one of the world foremost painter, for any generation. How do I categorize his
works? there isn’t any categories that he can fall into. After a hundred years,
how shall his paintings will touch a viewer? I believe in the same way as
today, enveloping the watcher with deep sense of elegant silence.
Ganesh
Pyne’s paintings are abstract in the sense that he does not directly
reconstruct the reality as it is. He is always layering and would smash your
thought with the deep felt silence of his narrative. Pyne always told a story
through his paintings, it is the story that you can reconstruct as you go on
peeling the different layers of the archetypal patterns of situation, thought
and feeling presented in the act of ritual or perceiving the central image of
the painting. He almost always had a central character (look at his paintings:
“The Creature”, “The Masks”, “Crown”, “Aarti”,”The Baul”, “Before the Lamp”,
“The Monkey” , “ The Wooden Horse” and so on.) This central image/character
encompass, both myth and ritual, and are not symbolic in nature but are also
codependent. His characters are mythical image associated with a symbolic
ritual to be seen as a part of a total pattern of meaning. We know that myth is
not merely a story told, but a reality lived that gets transformed through
human imagination and the associated ritual also embodies the same reality of
human experience symbolizing the creative synchronization between the living
being (organism) and the rhythms of the cosmos. Pyne’s artistry adroitly
publishes this mythical symbol implying an all-pervasive and all-inclusive
expanse in which all the divine forces co-exist and coordinate, epitomizing the
whole eternal cosmic process.
Yet
again the world the he showed through his works is always crumbling and
piercing in a very personal way. He almost always used dark colors like black,
yellow and blue and motifs suggesting pain and solitude. These remained
consistent themes in his work. I wouldn’t say he portrayed death, death I would
imagine, from my understanding of his paintings would be liberation from the
pain. He would rather focus on the twilight zones that exist, using symbolism
whenever it suits him to focus on the meeting point of day and night, of life
and death, of pain and pleasure, of life and agony. In his own words
"Artists of our generation painted for the love of
art.
I feel one should have an unwavering affair with ones creativity.
Otherwise, you are swept away by the tide"
I feel one should have an unwavering affair with ones creativity.
Otherwise, you are swept away by the tide"
– Ganesh Pyne
Not going to the history of
his life or what he did or how did he came about doing it , just by looking at
his works one can certainly say that Ganesh Pyne’s paintings were very personal
expressions. His signature style is a conscious attempt to construct a mythical
narrative shaped from his own experiences of solitude, alienation, pain,
horror, moods of tenderness, serenity and so on. I would argue, they are not
subconscious or surreal as many would put rather his images are offshoots of a
conscious idea that may have passed through his mind.
So
why will his paintings never be just wall beautiful decorations that will get
buried in multiple layers of passing time. It is because of the deep silence
that emanates from all of his works , forever changing the soul of the viewer.
If somebody did not see these works then they will not exist for him forever, on
the contrary, if you ever see them once it will start inhabiting the same world
as the viewer. One will start experiencing oneself as seen through the
eyes of the main character of the paintings. Appreciating the fact that human
life is incomplete and not fully satisfying because of the lack of perfection,
power, and control one has over their life. Nonetheless it has a connotation,
that is the meaning the works point to and requesting the viewer not to search
any more (for true self and personal meaning of life) but rather articulate in
words what is said through silence. Let the world know of its existence and
truth.
Are
they beautiful? Yes they are, because they are the truth. It is the bottomless
truth that exists in those works gives it the essence of beauty. Some onlookers
(like the dreamers) might see disenchantment in these paintings and mistake
them for truth. They are not disenchantments, they are borne out of
circumstances of history¸ creating situations that can
be expressed or transcended only through poetry. As if they are exploding into
an eternal fragile human narrative of we do not know what we want and yet we
are responsible for what we want. The viewer must interpret and re-interpret,
conjecturing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together.
Yet one is forced to re-create oneself into an authentic whole, almost by being
aware of himself as seen by the characters of those paintings with piercing
eyes.
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