Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind
“Among Indian painters today, Ram Kumar is perhaps the only one who lacks imitators and followers. This is because both his themes and method are simple. Their simplicity and sincerity make imitation practically impossible.”
Though these lines were written in 1955 by the renowned art critic Richard Bartholomew, describing Ram Kumar’s work at the time, they remain just as relevant today. Over the six decades he has dedicated to his craft, searching for a singular visual vocabulary, Kumar’s paintings consistently exude sincerity and integrity. In his unassuming and gentle manner, he has carved out a unique place for himself in the canon of modern Indian painting.
In the past two decades, representational forms have also made an appearance in Kumar’s landscapes, disrupting their abstract vistas. While some lie embedded within his colour fields and require slow, painstaking excavation, others, such as depictions of trees with their slender trunks and canopies of leaves, stand out. Do these semi-abstracts signal a gradual return of the real? Will other banished protagonists perhaps stage a re-appearance, this time shedding their mantle of despair and embracing a celebration of life? After six decades, Ram Kumar continues to keep us guessing about how the landscapes of his mind will unfold.