Rope in Ripples

This extensively documented volume captures the life of the artist Paresh Maity in his various moods and moorings. Hailed as one of the important watercolourists in Indian contemporary art scene Paresh Maity belongs to a generation that went through a lot of ideological crisis. His artistic training at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata and College of Art, New Delhi, Paresh Maity has immensely contributed his stylistic development.

The authors Uma Nair and Sushma Behl look at the life and works of the artist from two different angles. Uma Nair moves from Paresh Maity’s biographical sketching to the finer nuances of his art that encompasses watercolours, oil paintings, assemblages and installations. Sushma Behl looks at one peculiar strain of his works; the predominant presence of Eros. In Paresh Maity’s works eroticism comes as a recurrent theme, transcending the carnal into the realm of aesthetics without losing the stylistic traits of his oeuvre.

Uma Nair captures the intricacies of the artist’s life in a simple but engaged conversation at the outset and then set the tone of his life into haiku poems. She develops her haiku observations into full fledged aesthetic analysis of his works. Her attempt is to combine the aesthetic preoccupations of the artist with the thematic semblances of his life.

Born in Tamluk, a suburban town near the Bay of Bengal, Paresh has always been a lover of nature. His love for nature found benign expressions in watercolours, a technique that he had excelled as a student in the Government College of Art and Craft. His found his masters in the British watercolourists like William Turner and John Constable. He followed the works of the Impressionists and those of Cezanne very closely and this affection for the Impressionists helped him to perfect his visual language in different mediums.

“In the case of Paresh, he did not use pencil, pen and ink like  the old masters in the 1700s; instead he used the colour directly with the brush to indicate tonal contrasts along with the distinctiveness of applying the highlights as well as the darker tonalities,” observes Uma Nair. She also sheds light on how Paresh Maity evolved as he started traveling all over the world.

Though written in a very lucid and readable style, this book is quite heavy in its physical execution. Most of the important works are documented with adequate details. A chronology of the artist’s life pepped up with interesting album pictures makes the documentation interesting. Only drawback that I find with this book is its inability to contextualize the artist in his own times. The artist stands as a unique phenomenon, without aligning himself with other artists of his times. Had his artistic evolution been placed within the context of other artists who went along with similar or parallel concerns, this book would have been a bit more relevant than its present position as a collectors’ item as well as a coffee table book.