Exhibition of Paintings by AJOY KUMAR GHOSE

AJOY KUMAR GHOSE

Born in Bengal in 1938 and educated at the Government College of Art & Crafts, Kolkata under Shri Dhirendranath Brahma, Satyendranath Bandyopadhyay and Shri Benode Behari Mukherjee. He has held important positions as Member of Faculty Council, University of Kolkata and Head of the Department of Drawing and Painting -Indian style at the Government College of Art & Crafts, Kolkata from 1984 to 1998.

He has several group and solo shows to his credit. He has won several awards during his long career. He is also the Founder Member of the contemporary Bengal Artist Group. His paintings are in several collections in India and abroad.

Ajoy Ghose is continuing the trend set by his predecessors of the Indian Style painting of the Bengal School -a trend started by Shri Abanindranath Tagore and further promoted and developed by artists like Nandalal Bose, Kshitendranath Majumdar, Asit Haldar, Abdur Rehman Chughtai, Benode Behari Mukherjee and others. He has asserted himself as an artist still charmed with the essential mystique and charismatic glow of the innovators of the new Indian Style.

His technical expertise in space division, use of dimensional forms and lines, use of colours indicated his unique conceptual approach and modulation of inherited skills to the development of a visual language that is definitely modern despite being anchored in tradition.

Wash Technique:

In 1903, Okakura sent his two artist disciples Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958) and Hisbida Sbunso (1874-1911) to India, and they stayed with the Tagores in Calcutta. Abanindranath then observed Taikan-using a large, flat brush charged with water over a carefully painted and highly finished surface giving it a range of soft and delicate tonalities. Later, Abanindranath acknowledged this in one of his autobiographical writings. He developed the technique further.

After a thin transparent layer of watercolour, the painting was literally dipped in water (the Japanese never did it), which washed away some of the colour, and yet another transparent colour-wash was given on it. In this way, through successive colour and water-washes, different colours fused, bringing out tender tones, replacing the stern geometry of European pictorial space with a dream-like timelessness. Light always came from the white surface of the paper gouache was never used for the purpose.”