Balraj Khanna b. 1940 "The Marshes"

Balraj Khanna’s earliest works were tormented landscapes he had painted in the mid-1960s. Those were his formative years in England he had so cherished before leaving home. They reflected his inner turmoil at finding himself in what turned out to be an alien and an indifferent environment. That made Khanna all the more determined to discover himself as a an artist and, knowing London paradoxically was the only place which gave him the freedom to do so, he launched upon an odyssey of experimentation. Tortured scenes of a snowbound London gave way to manifestations of mother nature in more subtle ways. His feelings for landscape changed from macro to the micro, the seed as opposed to the forest, the generative earth beneath his feet rather than her visible effulgence. The essence of what he beheld began to hold greater meaning for him than its appearance.

After a short stay in a wintry Norfolk in 1965, Balraj Khanna returned to his bedsit studio in London to paint a series of paintings of the Norfolk marshes from his new-found vision.