Mitra’s works are characterized by experimentations with line, colour and movement. He writes about his lines as dividing agents and traces for movement. Colour adheres to line, ‘expressing a romantic act of consummation’.

‘The private worlds of image and language run parallel to each other. In apparent silence against all considerations of employability. But they keep us going, storing all our vital energy in its reserve. Its presence is almost imperceptible in the world of books. They are not to be found in exhibition rooms, pages of books, torn fragments of manuscripts, pictures, sculptures. They are struck silent, stuck in a strange phase of creation, like a surprising line of poetry or prose—’ from Bhashaye Chitrakolpo, Chitra-anushongo (Image-thinking and image-relations in language)

For his experimental practice with drawing and ink-based washes he has drawn not only from the tradition of Indian manuscript illustrations, Islamic calligraphy and East Asian landscape drawing, but also western art traditions like the ‘hypergraphics’ produced by the French lettrists of the early twentieth-century.

According to Mitra, Ghose would spend a lot of his time cycling around the Bengal countryside and painting natural scenes. His literary influences are invoked by Mitra in his frequent references to the poet Jibanananda Das, who wrote the famous poem ‘Banglar mukh ami dekhiyachi’ (I have seen the face of Bengal) and the novelist, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, who wrote the classic novel Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, later filmed by Satyajit Ray as his debut film), and Aranyak (The Forest). Mitra quotes from Aranyak in his own writings to suggest the many ways in which his writing slips into image-making and image-making finds its way into language, each enriching and even estranging the other from familiar and normative worlds of sense or sensibility.

‘His (Bibhutibhushan’s) language is suffused with colour. In our water colours, Gopal Ghose would inaugurate festivals of colour where many such unknown species of flowers would crowd the canvas. The emotional image-force that Bibhutibhushan employs to enthrall his readers is the same force that Gopal Ghose employs to depict his images drawn from his wild peregrinations.’ Hiran Mitra, Image-thinking and image-relations in language.

This feeling for nature is traced through the writings of Benode Behari Mukherjee too, as Mitra quotes from the latter’s texts to show how the artist battled darkness with senses of colour that is communicated to him by touching well-known flowers. In Mukherjee’s works we see a similar sense of transformation where human bodies appear to grow into natural forms and vice versa.

A frequent collaborator and friend of Mitra’s is Partha Pratim Deb, some of whose paintings, collages and sculptures were in Mitra’s collection as well. They worked together on an exhibition titled The Art of Advertising that sought to critique the rise of marketing as a strategy to sell artistic work.

They also used the occasion to point out the artificial hierarchies imposed in art schools, especially when it came to design or illustration work, which was usually seen as ‘inferior’ to classical painting or sculpture.

Hiran Mitra met Meera Mukherjee in the 1960s. Once again, he was recording his impressions of a documentary film that was being made on the famous sculptor when she was at work in a village called Elachi.

Mitra also made an elaborate scrollwork drawing from his influences in East Asian art and the impression of the natural environment where he made the work in situ. Aside from this, a new series of works offered a delicate treatment of leaves and organic matter that were impressed upon Japanese paper that he had been sent from a friend in that country.

These offered a nice summation of his career, signalling the variety of influences he has absorbed in his work over a lifetime's worth of experimental practice and indicating a vision that seeks to push the modernist legacies of Bengal art beyond its familiar search for personal subjectivity into realms of risk-taking that is necessary in order confront the world of another, or perhaps an ‘Other’, that will present an aesthetic and cultural challenge to this complacent self-identity in a global world.