Page 50 - Eye of the beholder

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love was considered the supreme rasa. In addition, Hindu sculptures as well as Indian ragas of the classical musical tradition bewitched him, not forgetting the magic of Walt Disney. His vision was unique; and his visual language combined judiciously the European modernists’ innovation with the ancient South Asian fresco techniques found at Ajanta and Sigiriya. The thematic content was rooted in local tradition, depicting dancers, nayikas and gods, drawn from Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
Keyt developed a predilection towards developing figurative compositions with women as protagonists, celebrating their forms through manifestations of sweet sentiments and set amidst the rustic milieu. This engagement marked his art to have commonality with many of the Indian artists belonging to the nationalist phase as Sailoz Mukerjee. In his artistic repertoire he consciously explored and navigated through line and colour. These elements became a dominant centrality of his artistic creations, which enhanced and reinforced his tropical colours - an inheritance carried over from his native island of serendipity. On the strength of line and color, Keyt advanced his deft artistry by melding modernist stylistic formula of cubist faceting, Fauvist colours and an expressive vocal line. With the integration of occident and Asiatic traditions, he established his distinctive style with a flair that allows easy recognition of his works even today.
With dramatic admixture of shifting and fractured planes, the ethnicity dominant in the characterization of the feminine forms particularly, Keyt created a large gamut of works in which with easy facility he established his distinct and different posture. His Nayika paintings were romantically mantled, visualized with a lyrical sense of grace, charm and poetic reverie, wherein the nubile maidens were totally absorbed with their tasks of either beautifying herself, gazing in the mirror or lost in nostalgic reverie. This genres of works stand at the intersection of romantic poetry and nationalist ideologies, which Keyt represented with utmost simplicity sans bodily adornments as common in frescoes of Sigiriya.
In his “Untitled” painting executed in 1965, the thematic content obviously gestures towards the representation of the Nayika, as she stands with her legs crossed, resonating with the nubile female forms of the ‘alasa kanyas’ in temple architecture and holding a mirror in the hand and admiring herself. The painting is as enigmatic as it is simple, yet the representation of the woman who apparently appears at the window is shown to be older and is peeping into the room and gesturing to the young girl with her finger. Is this a matriarchal concern as the room also has the representation of a man reclining on a bolster? The strength of his impeccable drawing comes through powerfully having balanced the appropriate curves of the young girl with the reclining male. Colours are earthy and warm projecting the erotic warm mood within the room, with eroticism further enhanced by the blossoming flowers that equally glances to a sense of covert sexuality. The floor is indicated through fractured linear spatial organization in the tradition of cubist masters. Though the forms are abstracted and stylized, Keyt has given a distinct aura of intimacy in the relaxed posture of the reclining male and the nayikas unabashed nudity, lost in the admiration of her beauty in the mirror.
The Nobel Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda eloquently had declared - “Keyt, I think is the living nucleus of a great painter. Magically though he places his colours, and carefully though he distributes his plastic volumes, Keyt’s pictures never-the-less produce a dramatic effect particularly in his painting of Sinhalese people. These figures take on a strange expressive grandeur and radiate an aura of intensely profound feelings”.
The “Reclining Nude” 1989, executed in oil is a large canvas which in its compositional organization with the nude reclining languidly and the sun shining represented in the extreme upper right hand corner has echoes of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The feminine form is linearly