Satish Gujral: Portfolio Print

"An artist is like a man on a journey, always seeing the topography or the various aspects of life," believes Satish Gujral.  Between this belief and its expression, ranging over 59 years from the time he first literally exploded visually in the realm of pain with his Partition paintings to his latest work which exults with joy at the rhythms of the human body in sports, you can almost glean the biographical progression of Gujral through his work alone.  Snatched from the world of sound at the age of eight, he forced his silence to speak; through the canvas with paint, on the walls through his murals, through paper for his collages, through brick, stone and mortar for his architecture, through burnt wood for the fire within, through sculpture for the dimensions he sought for movement and through, always and always back again, to the canvas for his intimacies with pain and joy.  Within the feeling of the grand design that a viewer always gets on seeing any of Gujral’s work there are the intricacies of perfect draughtsmanship, the assurance of line, the sweeping movement, and the easy flow of images over one and into the other.  He toyed briefly with oil but went on to create his own mix of acrylic.  In changing colours, he told the story of his life over the years.  The dramatic passion of smouldering black and the fiery reds of the early period yielded at a later stage to more muted browns and yellows, on to a blaze of mustard and deep violet, or a dash of an errant pink.  There was this breathless movement of the human form, in tandem with images of animals and birds, which created a vocabulary of expression that people recognize even if the artist has changed the theme or surfaced with a new arrangement of images; of the human form, birds and animals running over, into, and almost dialoguing with each other.  "The overlapping of images is like the overlapping of sound over what I see now," he says and then adds quietly, "or, over my silence."