Untitled

Like most of his contemporaries, Gobardhan Ash also started out as a creator of mesmerising landscapes, mostly in watercolour. This late-career Untitled work, painted just a few years before his passing, is almost like him revisiting his initial years, albeit in oil. The cool colour palette, too, is a hark back to the early phase of his career of aqueous shades. Here, he paints a late afternoon in a village, with women absorbed in their work outdoors as the day gradually advances. Ash excels himself in capturing the late afternoon sunlight casting shadows of the bare-branched trees and women-folk.