Ashok Bhowmick

Born at Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1953, India, Ashok Bhowmick is a renowned artist known as a “Master of Cross-hatching”. Though many artists ranging from Rembrandt to Rabindranath Tagore and F.N Souza used style in their paintings, in Bhowmick’s works it is more than a technique and it has got a unique identity as a medium. Irrespective of the medium or the size of the work, he brilliantly uses this unique style, rendered with pen and ink. 

After applying solid colour, he adds texture and then meticulously draws numerous lines, thus adding deep and dark shadows to the subjects and creating a lighter effect. While the darker spaces are created with dense mesh of lines, the lighter areas are achieved through its controlled use, thus developing his inimitable signature style. Bhowmick uses nibs that are especially designed for cross-hatching.

On a closer look one can experience a sense of silence in his paintings. Bhowmick believes that urban art is often the expression of isolated or socially or spiritually uprooted individuals deprived of material life around, with no responsibility whatsoever.

At the same time, there is the expression of a revivalist in his works, and it also reflects his insight on Indian tradition in art. He has closely studied the cave paintings from Indus Valley Civilisation and Bronze Age and these works play an influential role in his paintings.  However, he brings about a contemporary character to it. Bhowmick’s philosophy is that the everlasting symbols of the old culture are still meaningful. However, they are badly in need of renewal in fresh contemporary forms, and only artists can do so, for “they bring back the dead wood of abstraction to life”, he says.

On the other hand, he uses a wide range of images, ranging from animals, birds, human beings, puppets and buildings in his paintings, which are generally centred on the ‘childhood memories’, though not nostalgically. 

Hues like bright red, vivid blues, minty greens and subtle greys add to the vibrancy of his paintings. In the application of colour also he has his own methods. He first paints a single solid colour or a combination of two contrasting colours in the background and then paints his subjects.

“The painter has a fair technical ability to play on the keyboard of our moods. His sundry compositional moves are put to humanising uses, and are not neutral aesthetic strategies alone, as with some other painters,” renowned art critic Keshav Malik observed once.

The way he manipulates and renders his images is quite distinct, and while he makes living objects appear frozen, the artists adds vigour to inactive, lifeless elements. 

Apart from being an exceptionally good painter, he is also an experimental sculptor and a insightful intellectual and a prolific writer.

“You don’t need to understand a picture, you should experience it. If the artist had a story to share, he could’ve become a storyteller,” he says.

His work is largely figurative. What makes it stand apart from the works of other contemporary artists from the Bengal School of art, to which he belongs, is its close connection to the political situation in the state. 

Governor’s Award, Calcutta in 1974.