I want to be remembered as an honest man,” says artist Ashok Bhowmick, leaning back in his chair as the afternoon sun filters through the windows. Behind him, is a wall of monochromatic paintings, each composed of thousands of minuscule strokes. Born in Kanpur, Bhowmick grew up among factories and modest homes, where imagination often bloomed in unexpected corners. “I used to trace cracks on the walls with my eyes,” he recalls. “Those were my first lessons in drawing lines.” The 72-year-old Delhi artist’s current retrospective, Liminal Lines, presented by Dhoomimal Gallery, boasts over 150 works.
In the early 1970s, while studying at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata, he found his voice amid the political and artistic turbulence of the times. “We drew not to decorate walls, but to understand the world.” That urge to understand—not merely to depict—led him to his signature: cross-hatching, the meticulous layering of fine lines that creates light, shadow, and emotional density. “With cross-hatching I kind of arrive at unique shades of the same colour—something that’s not really achievable by mixing pigments,” he explains. “It’s a discovery that happens on paper, stroke by stroke.” The process is almost monastic. He begins with a flat field of colour—the deep red of earth, a muted grey, or mint green—then builds upon it with intersecting lines. The denser the mesh, the deeper the tone; the looser the weave, the gentler the light.
Many of his paintings feature a bird, and even some of his sculptures take avian form. Ask him why, and he smiles: “The bird, of course, signifies freedom. But it also stands for something more—fearlessness. If you think about it, a bird is always fearless. It perches almost nonchalantly atop ferocious bulls and man-eater tigers. It has a quiet strength, and that speaks to me.”
For Bhowmick, painting is inseparable from reading, cinema, and poetry. “An artist must read, must listen, must watch,” he insists. “The transmutation of text into image is an alchemy worth knowing. Sensitivity grows only when you let all forms of art speak within you.” In a world that celebrates spectacle and speed, Bhowmick’s art insists on slowness. “People ask me why I spend so long on one piece,” he says with a quiet smile. “But art is not about how fast your hand moves. It’s about how truth settles inside you.”
