A painting by Tapas Ghosal

The eternal city of Varanasi has inspired many contemporary Indian artists who created some masterpieces inspired by it. In his current exhibition at Gallery K2, Tapas Ghosal conjures up the Varanasi of his imagination, a town with fluttering penants, jagged edges, a multitude of temples and steps that wander in and out of light and shadows. In this series of acrylic paintings on canvases of 24x24 inch and 12x12 inch dimension, the ancient holy city with its tortuous alleyways comes alive in muted shades of Indian red, ochre, white and grey.

The Ganga flowing by the city is sometimes a vivid turquoise blue coloured by a sky of the same shade or else a cold and ghostly grey. At times a city vibrant with life turns into a city of shades with the Lethe flowing by it. Ghosal, who was born in 1965, has matured into an artist of promise.

He has also painted a series of heads of mendicants, and men and women with angular faces set against a soothing backdrop of sepia or ochre. No doubt Ghosal is a skilled artist, but this series, at times, tends to look too much like refined illustration than a serious work of art.

It would be easy to detect the traces of post-impressionist artists in the paintings of Gopal Ghose, an exhibition of whose works was mounted recently by Ganges Art Gallery. Ghose was born in 1913 and died in 1980 and he would paint tirelessly. Ever since his death several exhibitions of his works have been held but this particular one gave a good impression of his entire oeuvre.

A work by Gopal Ghose

It is not only that his landscapes were shown but we got the chance to see his birds and beasts and human figures as well. As the drawing of Sita in the purifying embrace of fire proves, Ghose excelled in this field too. His pair of owls and pigeons are proof of his power of observation.

However, his forte was landscape. Ghose used watercolour, gouache and pastels as well in these paintings in which nature pervades the universe and sparks off flames of red and green in the woodlands, causes the flowering grass to multiply in fields, and draws a curtain of indigo after the sun goes down.

Ghose like many artists of those times was certainly influenced by post-impressionist painters but his art was firmly rooted in the soil of Bengal. The expressiveness of his colouring lent credibility to some of his bold experimentation with pigments and brushwork.