Friday, November 30, 2012

Dazzling beauty of fluent, fluid lines

Before color paintings and today’s much fancied new media came to existence, what mattered most to proponents of creativity and expression was the fine art of line drawings. The genre has existed since the era of early civilization and is still termed the original and genuine form of expression.

The dominance of lines can be gauged by peeping into the history of art. One can see the distinctness of line drawings from the ancient cave paintings to the origin of creative arts across the world. While for sheer academic purposes, it acts as a pointer towards the finished work, for collectors it’s akin to a rare insight into an artist’s soul.

When a sculptor or a painter wishes to give shape to unbounded imagination, the creative process is set in motion by making lines. They tend to form the initial crucial jotting of the germ and a draft layout for the artwork. That is what makes drawings fascinating and priceless.

Artists generally turn to drawing for expressing their inner urge in an uncomplicated manner, akin to the inner dialogue one is having with oneself. Some of the famous Indian artists known for their proficiency in the medium are Jamini Roy, Ganesh Pyne, Nandlal Bose, and MF Husain among others. Each has had his individual style and technique. They all have been greatly inspired by the simplicity of drawing as an art form.

A drawing invariably sets the structure and format for creative minds that essentially serve as pointers to the concept of a finished painting. For example, if one looks at legendary artist Pablo Picasso’s drawings from his famed Suite Vollard collection, one can grasp that some of them lead up to his most iconic piece, Guernica.

FN Souza’s scribbles of nudes, the manner in which he deftly placed his magical figures across a surface, the oft-endless studies of horses by Sunil Das, the depth of artist Tyeb Mehta’s minimal brushstrokes, all perfectly preceded by countless of drawings…all of these creations are not only of academic interest, but also precious collectibles in their own right!

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