Ram Kumar (b. 1924)

Pinholes to extreme edges of canvas from previous framing faintly visible. Minor paint shrinkage to dark browns in center of work. Overall canvas appears to be in good condition. colors of original slightly deeper and richer than catalogue illustration.
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Ram Kumar's landscapes of the late 1960's and early 1970's mark a departure from the tightly composed compositions of his Varanasi series of the early 1960's.   In some sense the landscapes are internalised, they are more inspired by memories, particularly of his childhood, than by the geographical features of a specific place or region.  These 'mindscapes' allow for more open images that appear to expand beyond the confines of the canvas, the forms that he paints are meditations on the moods that such landscapes inspired within him, they are landscapes as experienced not as seen.

'Ram Kumar's paintings have a distinct feeling of primordial time about them. His moss-like greens, wet bark-like browns, his typical patches of mustard yellow as if covered under the shadow of a lone cloud, his blue expanses directly derived from an old deserted water tank attached to a remote temple or mosque and determined lines as if stemming from crack-structures in ancient monuments give birth to paintings that are 'parallel' interior landscapes' (Jyotindra Jain, Center for Contemporary Art Exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1990).

There is a sense that there is linear progression towards greater abstraction in Ram Kumar's works of this period, but in many instances this is not the case.  In some works from the 1970's elements of cityscapes resurface, and later still structures such as Humayun's Tomb emerge in his work, but despite the infrequent reappearance of identifiable elements of landscape there is a distillation of form, that marks a growing artistic confidence in his work.  Swaminathan terms this artistic style as refraction where 'you realise the reality of the mundane...you stand revealed to yourself, alone in the mirage of the world.'  (J Swaminathan in Ram Kumar A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996).

'Musing upon Ram Kumar's work, a vast hinterland of images opens up in one of the corridors of my mind...I walk over wastelands, I see petrified cities, I see unending landscapes of greys and browns and at times I come upon the deep blue of a lagoon or the red flush of a dawn.  Wherever I go along this corridor without walls, I feel that I see but am not seen.  It is a world which is not concerned with me, where I am an intruder and where I can justify my presence only by looking back at myself; I breathe the stony silence of this world and I become a body of water: I am thawed out, I feel cleansed and see myself in the mirror of my own soul: I ponder upon my life, upon life, I feel a little sad and a little happy and I am grateful.' (ibid.)