Artists are driven by the compulsion to create, even ones without formal training. And not all are successful in the cutthroat world of galleries and auctions. When the vicissitudes of life did not allow Ashok Bhowmick to go to art college, he found a way to home-school himself by closely following senior artists of the time and visiting local libraries to devour all literature he could find on the subject.
His first solo show of paintings was held in 1974 while doing postgraduation in Botany in Kanpur, where he spent most of his formative years. Two of the works were selected for display at the annual exhibition of the UP State Lalit Kala Akademi.
“That was when my painting entered the professional realm. I never thought of it as a means to earn money. It was only in 2004 that I finally left my job and took up painting as my only profession,” says Bhowmick, who lives in Gurugram.
As many as 33 of his most definitive artworks created over his five-decade-long career were recently shown at the solo show ‘Made in the Shade—the Inimitable Art of Ashok Bhowmick,’ held at Delhi’s Dhoomimal Gallery.
The artist is fluent in cross-hatching––the repetitive drawing of lines at certain angles to create the desired effect. It is Bhowmick’s skilful usage of a dense mesh of lines to play with light and shadow on the canvases that have earned him the distinctive badge as a master of this technique.
For the first 22 years of his career, he painted exclusively in monochrome—largely black and white, sometimes with tints of sepia. After 2002, his colour palette became brighter, but his crosshatched figures posed against solid backdrops continued.
Bhowmick’s oeuvre is predominantly figurative, and this new collection is no different, with humans and animals in a range of vivid colours. Though the artist refuses to call the exhibition a ‘retrospective’, he accedes to the fact that it represents two opposite poles of his career.
“I believe in these two extremities one can see the changes that took place in my understanding of art, its purpose and the influences of the changing world around me. Over the years, I have also learnt the limitations of art,” he says.
Exploring limitations is how an artist’s mind becomes free. Bhowmick is finding his own freedom in the binary world of imagination.