Lyrical Landscapes

BIKASH PODDAR

Bikash Poddar is one of our best known landscape painters from Bengal. His landscapes reflect the flow of colour that Bengal art assimilated from Chinese and Japanese calligraphic art and blended with the detailed depiction of monuments and human figures we find in our own miniatures. 

Indeed, his early works consisted of landscapes in miniature format with highly detailed architecture: ruined temples, weathered habitations and boats by the waterside. What struck me then was the proportions of the human figures that blended beautifully with the landscape and yet held their ground in a symbiotic relationship that evoked the relation between man and his creations together.

Since then he has blown up these miniatures in scale in a manner that builds a harmony between forms and the formless flows of colour, inviting the eye to explore space while at the same time following the narrative of his figures set in the theatrical backdrop of architectural forms. These romantic reveries of spaces in the mind are successful largely because of his excellence as a painter of rare quality without which his landscapes would have been reduced to being mere pictures.

These they are not. They span the hiatus between two great neighbouring cultures, those of India and China, the first highlighting detailed forms bursting  with life while the other evokes a sense of the essence of aesthetic expression of the human presence  at its most minimal. The success of these works of his resides in how he balances the two with a delicacy few artists achieve.

Born in 1954 in Kaliyaganj, North Bengal, Bikash Poddar studied at the College of Art and Craft, Kolkata to complete his five years of diploma in Applied Art with a gold medal. He turned to full time painting in the nineties, following his success of his shows of watercolours in Delhi and Mumbai. He has shown his works in nearly 25 solo and group shows in India and abroad. His works are with collectors and corporate houses in Delhi, Mumbai, USA, Hongkong, Canada, Australia and Singapore besides others.