LANDSCAPE
101 by 76 cm.; 40 by 30 in.
Signed in Devnagri upper right Oil on canvas This urban landscape by Ram Kumar dates from the early 1960s after he had moved on from painting his forlorn figurative works, and it was shortly after this he painted his acclaimed Benares series. The human condition is the main concern of the painter manifested in his early works by the alienated individual within the city. Later the city, specifically Varanasi with dilapidated, crammed houses conveys a sense of hopelessness. Increasingly abstract works done in sweeping strokes of paint evoke both exultation of natural spaces and more recently an incipient violence within human habitation. The composition is of tumbledown walls, steep roofs that seem about to fly off, gaping windows and doors, and suggestions of winding narrow streets. Yet there are no signs of figures. Ram Kumar is moving towards an abstraction which is much more than a play of colours or juggling of lines. The overall tonality of somber greys and browns as well as the rich impasto and texture, are so characteristic of the artist’s work at that time. However painstaking his search for the exact tonalities he persists in it till the bitter end. He does not care if in the process he has to blot out the sky and put out the sun.