Page 100 - Eye of the beholder

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The earlier landscapes that Almelkar had painted were in bold colours and brushwork that was Impressionistic in its expression. The paintings were bathed in sunlight creating a vibrant ambience. In these early works two artists who had a major influence on his him were Walter Langhammer and N.S. Bendre. The former’s works were based on sweeping broad brush strokes and vibrant colours while Bendre’s landscapes had power of subtlety. These two opposing elements found a judicious synthesis in Almelkar’s landscapes.
Constructing his forms, concepts and colour from the structures of Rajput miniatures, he formulated his distinct artistic vocabulary from 1955 onwards and from 1960 to 1970’s Almelkar established his visual language that had character of Indian authenticity, strength of subject matter or thematic content and a unique vision in his compositional layout. His subjects were ordinary common folks going about their routine chores as group of sweepers, fisherwomen selling their wares and gossiping, housewives involved in their chores including musicians and dancers. His works were mainly female centric representing them as nayikas absorbed in their day dreaming or beautifying themselves. For these female beauties he had developed a distinct facial formula of an idealized type with features that alluded to forms in nature as it was in the Indian pictorial tradition. Yet he contemporarised them with his brush work and modelling of forms. Despite the fact that his motifs were Indian with folk drummers and agricultural field he gave it a modernist tweak in the management of space and forms.
A glance at his oeuvre reveals that the artist had a deep insight about the village life as well as the folk and tribal communities. This could have been made possible not through his imagination however vivid or creative, but his travels through several tribal areas, villages and forests across Western India especially Rajasthan, Gujarat, Kutch, Maharashtra and the whole of the Western coast up to Kerala. He created a documentation of his travels thus including a survey of people and the natural scenes.
Almelkar was a prolific artist and he created in various mediums as water colours, oils, including drawings and sketches which served as ideational notations for him. Among his privileged elements, which he engaged with to communicate his expressions emotions and sentiments were lines, colours and textures. His lines were bold and rhythmic but sensitive and equally versatile. His colours had stridency yet were pleasing and striking. He had an acute insight into the use of colours premised on his perceptions having travelled extensively and scrutinized nature at close quarters. There was meticulousness and precision in the way he applied his colours to his figures and other inanimate objects. Applying colors with his fingers and finishing the work with a clear outline in waterproof ink, he retained a sense of Indianness in his depictions, which in almost all cases were simple portrayals of people. He also experimented with cardboard as the base of his works. Almelkar often used the paste of cowries to import a shine to the surface of his paintings.
According to Suhas Bahulkar Art Historian and Curator, “Almelkar remained an avid, accurate and brilliant sketcher all his life. His sketchbooks were his constant companions. He filled them with evocative drawings and illustrations, many of which became the source for larger works and paintings. When he studied in Bombay between 1935 and 1940 at Nootan Kala Mandir, his teacher G S Dandavatimath continually stressed the importance of drawing and sketching.
He even supposedly told the young artist to take his daily meal only after doing at least 25 sketches a day! Almelkar followed the advice sincerely and kept the practice of sketching till his very last”. Thus line emerged in his work that had the quality of a meticulous draughtsman,