Landscapes artworks by Manisha Dey, Ramlal Dhar & others July 27, 2009

Landscapes artworks by Manisha Dey, Ramlal Dhar, Sohini Dhar, Gopal Ghose, Mrinal Mandal, Surya Prakash and Sandip Roy. Landscape painting is regarded by many artists and critics as anachronistic and, even dead. Landscape has always had a vital role to play in the visual arts whether historically or aesthetically and to deny its importance is absurd. Nature, with its infinite forms, lines, surfaces, textures and colours, has always been a source of inspiration to artists. Entire worlds can be found in the marks upon stones, the organic outlines of hills and the monumentality of forests as can be witnessed in the paintings of Manisha Dey, Ramlal Dhar, Sohini Dhar, Gopal Ghose, Mrinal Mandal, Surya Prakash and Sandip Roy. Landscape is very much a dynamic medium which moves from one place or time to another and ought not to be viewed in terms of fixed genres such as the picturesque, pastoral or sublime. Instead, it is perhaps more useful to view it as a site of visual appropriation and a vital element in the formation of social, cultural and political identities. Within modern and contemporary Indian art, the transference of European, especially British, landscape conventions in visual representation presents an intriguing picture of the experiential contradictions of exoticism and familiarity. In this sense, some view landscape in the form of the picturesque European tradition as dead but when it comes to self-critical representation and serious art, the insistence on this so-called death has lead to a renewal Landscape, in its true form, is seen by many as an essentially modern phenomenon connected to a new way of seeing. Naturally, the complexity, richness and antiquity of Chinese landscape cannot be denied especially bearing in mind that it had an immense role to play in the development of British and, therefore, colonial, landscape aesthetics. There are those who view representative landscape painting as an agent of cultural colonialism although there is little to link it to colonialism in any direct way. It can be viewed, more profitably, as the result of certain colonial artistic practices, unfolding its own movement in time and space from its point of origin and returning both to disclose its utopian fantasies and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence. Arguably, landscape is better understood as a medium of cultural expression rather than a fine art or genre of painting. While none can deny the genre of painting termed landscape with its special emphasis on natural objects as its theme, it must also be borne in mind that this theme is not simply to be represented in paint but a symbolic form in its own right. The traditional categories into which landscape painting has been classified the sublime, picturesque and so on are distinctions based not upon style but in the manner of visual spaces and objects to be depicted. Landscape also helps express the unique communication between the human and non-human elements. It is not just a natural scene but a representation of the real, imaginary and idealized. Even the most formulaic and stylized landscapes tend to be true to some sort of idealized version of nature.

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