Writing about Gaitonde’s philosophy on art and life, fellow artist Prabhakar Kolte explains that he always “…had immense faith in silence. He followed a rule: painting equals life. He considered it the means as well as the end, the journey as well as the destination. And he was psychologically, intellectually and physically prepared for this odyssey…His belief that silence is creative became increasingly firm, to the extent that his paintings attained an enigmatic quality. He became engrossed in trying to develop the visual aspect of silence. As a result, silence transformed onto the canvas spontaneously as a visual script” (“Husain and Gaitonde”, From Art to Art – Essays and Critique by Prabhakar Kolte, Bodhana Arts Foundation, Mumbai, 2008, p. 82).

By the mid-1980s Gaitonde had taken this ‘visual script’ of silence to a new level of sophistication. Having mastered the manipulation of colour, light and texture through the meticulous layered application and then removal of pigment on his surfaces, the artist was able to bestow his paintings with depth and luminosity, simplicity and an air of mystery. In this 1985 canvas, tones of blue, green and gray complement and offset each other, highlighting the unique, almost calligraphic forms that Gaitonde was able to excavate from the layers of pigment. “In these paintings, the medium is not separate from the so-called content”; their infrastructure of forms and colours is a dynamic one, created by the “…tension between a translucent surface…and the motifs which lurk on the same canvas but from some distance” (Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, not paginated).

Writing about Gaitonde’s philosophy on art and life, fellow artist Prabhakar Kolte explains that he always “…had immense faith in silence. He followed a rule: painting equals life. He considered it the means as well as the end, the journey as well as the destination. And he was psychologically, intellectually and physically prepared for this odyssey…His belief that silence is creative became increasin