Important Notice

“I become whole when I paint.” - GANESH PYNE

A master draughtsman and painter, Ganesh Pyne’s canvases are telling of his experiences of solitude and pain. However, within the ethos of his works is a sense of tenderness and serenity. Pyne’s deep fascination with decay and death serves as a preamble for his deception of the circle of life, with the artist drawing inspiration from literature, Puranic mythology and folklore. “Pyne’s... “I become whole when I paint.” - GANESH PYNE

A master draughtsman and painter, Ganesh Pyne’s canvases are telling of his experiences of solitude and pain. However, within the ethos of his works is a sense of tenderness and serenity. Pyne’s deep fascination with decay and death serves as a preamble for his deception of the circle of life, with the artist drawing inspiration from literature, Puranic mythology and folklore. “Pyne’s ‘signature’ style is shaped by his own experiences of solitude and alienation that he had lived through and aided by the pain and horror he had witnessed in the city of Calcutta during the sixties of the last century. What surfaced in his art however appear as mysteriously enriched with moods of tenderness and calm serenity, rich with visual depth in which every single stroke appear charged with muted eloquence.” (Arun Ghose, Jottings as Paintings of Ganesh Pyne, Agra: Sanchit Art Gallery, 2014, p. 2) Despite its deep melancholic nature, his work doesn’t aim to evoke a sense of despair. Rather, it offers a focused view and insight into the artist’s own inner dialogue, around themes that are an inevitable part of his identity.

Pyne’s artistic vocabulary has both “...self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one’s mind, where it explodes like a conceptual mine that has been activated by contact. Of course, there is also an occluded playfulness that inhabits Pyne’s more apparent melancholia: his secrecy follows a method of allusion, but his references can be made to unknown or invented sources, giving his allegory an edge of unpredictability” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne,” Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Mumbai: Galerie 88, 2005, p. 16)

It was in the 1960s that Pyne began experimenting with tempera to refine his unique idiom and perfect his command over chiaroscuro, patterning and texturing of the painted surface. While his contemporaries worked with oil and other mediums, Pyne stayed true to gum- based pigments and tempera. Reflecting on the artist’s choice, Ranjit Hoskote notes, “Neither oil nor watercolour satisfied him: their range of effects was neither sumptuous enough on the one hand, nor ethereal enough on the other, to convey his particular atmospheres. He wished to work in a medium that was equally free of opacity and transparency. It was in the teaching and practice of Nandalal Bose, the Shilpacharya, as he was known, that Pyne found the medium that he was to adopt as his own: tempera, using fine medical gum as the binder for ground pigment. Tempera gave Pyne both crispness of line and a sense of depth, the necessary illusion of volume as well as a sense of idyllic lightness.” (Hoskote, p. 13)

Pyne’s handling of the medium was nothing short of genius, with the artist mastering glazing and scumbling through tempera, much like others would achieve with oil paints. It enabled him to further mature his style, which ultimately spawned a visual language that was uniquely his.

In the present lot, the artist draws attention to a skeletal figure that serves as the crux of his canvas. Aptly titled Sleep, the figure, which is human but not quite, appears to be in a stupor. Inevitably, Pyne’s work, as with the present lot, is punctuated by the loss he experienced in his personal life and the carnage that ravaged Calcutta in the 1940s. Although painted in his characteristically warm palette, complete with dramatic lighting, the shadow of death looms heavy within this work as his visual language bears the mark of tragedy experienced in his formative years. “Pyne is a master of patterning; in a sense, this is how he controls the emotional chaos and the heart-breaking melancholia of his subject matter. His paintings are assembled together by alternate stripes of light and shadow, by neat ensembles of ribs, arrangements of bones, strange shapes of shadow. These are relics of the macabre, reliquaries of absence and loss; but they are also markers of order.” (Hoskote, p. 14)

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