Page 80 - Eye of the beholder

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GANESH PYNE [1937-2013]: ONEIRIC REALITY
He was one of those unique artists whose quest lay in discovering alternate iconographies. He developed a coded language for images of life and death from various Indian textual sources. He interrogated the contemporary domain through the mediation of timeless imagery. Considered an “Artist’s Artist”, Pyne’s national recognition lay in his unique art. A recluse by nature, he brought to his praxis the dark world of death; experiences of his impressionable childhood days that had remained internalized and became vital constituent of his art. Pyne’s paintings carried a mysterious and enigmatic aura infused with angst and tension. The protagonists were specially visualized as characters belonging to another realm or spatial dimension. The visual language he developed to communicate the depth of his angst and concept was in correspondence with his forms that potentially conveyed the world of dark reality of the grey subconscious. This world he wove into the fabric of his being was for a reason; having encountered death at an impressionable age of ten. There is an oft-repeated story about Pyne's first experience of death. During the riots that shook Calcutta in 1946, nine-year-old Pyne was living with his family in a hospital after being evacuated from their home. One day, he came across a handcart of corpses on their way to the mortuary. The body on top was that of an old woman. Even as blood flowed out of her body, her necklace shone. These experiences of communal riots in Bengal in months leading to partition had got entrenched in his subconscious leaving a trace on the psyche. His paintings therefore were a combination of the captivating mysticism and his visceral response to the violence he had witnessed. According to Pyne, ‘True darkness gives one a feeling of insecurity bordering on fear but it also has its own charms, mystery, profundity, a fairyland atmosphere.’
Born in Calcutta [Kolkata] into an elite family that had lost its fortune, the formative influence on his life was Pyne’s grandmother who apparently opened his ‘third eye’. He had avidly listened to her stories sitting on the balcony of his family home; derived from Bengali folk tales, epics, Upanishads and many other literary traditions. As a teenager Pyne discovered the paintings of the Bengal School, particularly of Sunayani Devi (1875-1962) and Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). The nationalist modern art prompted in Pyne a romantic, symbolist style based on Indian mythology using ink wash and tempera on cloth. Pyne nevertheless was known as the master of tempera in modern Indian Art and seminally he will remain the last signifier of the Bengal School. Eventually he moved on from these early influences and by 1950s his works become more existential in theme, reflecting the post-colonial crisis of identity India was experiencing at the time. Besides the influence of Abanindranath and the Bengal School, his art was equally influenced by Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Paul Klee.
His facility as a dexterous and skilled draughtsman and an animator was well known. Soon after his graduation from The Government College of Arts in 1959, Pyne took up a job at Mandar Mullick Studios, the first animation studios in India, where he established his credentials as a meticulous draughtsman. It was while working at this studio that Clair Weeks who was from Los Angeles taught Pyne the distortions and exaggeration of forms with the prime motive of conveying emotions. It eventually became Pyne’s significant stylistic vocabulary instilling a sense of uncanny feeling to his works.
Stylistically his paintings were hyper realistic with an aura of surrealist enigmatic ambience with frightened birds, the very human looking mantis with soulful eyes or terrified human forms which he developed with particular character. The internalization of his personal experiences gave rise to rich, fantastic and oneiric images – multi-layered, complex and highly sensitive.