Pious Life

Gobardhan Ash enrolled in the Government College of Art in 1926 and, deeply disillusioned by the curriculum, dropped out and joined the Madras School of Art to train under the mentorship of Devi Prosad Roychowdhury. Ash responded to the turbulence of the Bengal Famine with a series of rusty brown washes, which hovers somewhere between the gritty documentation of Chittaprosad and the abstract energy of Somnath Hore. Drawing from the vocabulary of Primitivism, Ash painted several portraits and figures, where the subjects have been reduced to their mere contours. In this image, we see the silhouettes of two figures. The artist has filled the silhouettes with a block of red. One of them has its feet slightly raised, suggesting motion and their shape suggests that they might be wearing long travelling cloaks.