Reflection

Mukul Dey trained under the famous painter-etcher James Blanding Sloan of Chicago and pushed the limits of etching as a technique. He moulded it according to the visual and aesthetic vocabularies of the Indian subcontinent. Dey’s oeuvre typically consists of rural landscapes, tinged with a nostalgic longing for the countryside—where lush fields, rivers and people come alive through his keen sense of light and shade. In this etching, we see a woman looking at herself in the mirror. She has flowers in her hair, and, in an otherwise sparse pictorial space, the artist takes care to draw each petal with meticulous detail. Curiously, the subject is imagined before an open window, but instead of looking out into the world she looks back at herself.