Artist : Sambhu Saha
Title : Ghat (Digha)
Medium : Oil on canvas
Size : 24” x 30”
Year : 2011
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JOURNEYS
Born in 1975, SAMBHU SAHA belongs to the rare breed of young, contemporary Indian Impressionist painters.
Sambhu drew his inspiration from the legendary Gopal Ghosh, who worked with water colour, tempera, mixed and pastel mediums, never following the Western Academic style. Instead, his inspiration was classical Chinese, in the rendering of brushwork, and Western Impressionism, in the application of colour.
Sambhu too uses relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes and open compositions, with an emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities.
The Impressionist style of painting, popularized by artists like Manet, Monet and Renoir, rejects the use of colours in a grammatical manner. There is instead a concentration on the general impression produced by a scene, and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light. The idea is to just create an impression of what the artist wants to convey.
In Shambhu’s work one sees that freely brushed colours are given primacy over line. He uses short thick strokes of colour to quickly re-create the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject and its details. Paint is often applied impasto, unmixed. His more contemplative work has darker tones, while his village and ghat scenes are done with small strokes of colour, placed side by side to produce the effect of light. Wet paint is placed into wet paint without waiting for successive applications to dry, producing softer edges and an intermingling of colour….but the optical mixing of colours occurs in the eye of the viewer.
Shambu often paints in the outdoors to capture the transient effects of sunlight. Often, he paints in the evening to capture the shadowy effects of twilight. Like photographers, he is inspired to capture the moment. But his art goes a step further than realistic photography….it has a subjectivity that photography cannot include. His paintings are his perceptions of nature, rather than exact reflections of what he sees. This is what allows him to exploit the medium of colour and technique, so unique to this style of painting.