| One of the most renowned Indian artists of the twentieth century, Jamini Roy forged a new artistic direction for modern India. He graduated from the Government School of Art in Calcutta in 1908 but soon rejected the Western academic style in favor of the folk and popular culture of rural Bengal. He studied the Patua (scroll) mode of painting, which featured figures and motifs repeated from one painting to another.
Roy developed a distinct visual language that emphasized carefully simplified forms and balanced design. His subjects generally included the Hindu god Krishna, characters from the ancient epic Ramayana, musicians, and dancers. He drew bold calligraphic lines in a limited palette of seven colors: red, yellow ocher, cadmium, green, vermillion, gray, blue, white, and black. As in this painting of three identical Hindu women in ultramarine blue saris, Roy captured the essence of lower-caste and rural inhabitants with respect and dignity. 1
1 Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Indian Canvas: A Hybrid Legacy,” in Y. Dalmia and Salima Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 104. |
