Still Life with Fruits - II

Coming of age as an artist at a time when the Indian art world was headily exploring a modernist idiom, Jogen Chowdhury charted his own course, discarding both Western artistic techniques as well as romantic notions of India’s past. His visual vocabulary evolved into signature strokes such as cross-hatched lines, pointillist objects, and spindly shapes, which hark back to a childhood in which he would spend long hours studying the shapes of plants and creepers in their natural surroundings. This still-life—a rare in Chowdhury’s oeuvre—shows a pumpkin, a brinjal, and half an onion, in the artist’s characteristic strokes.