"Painting to me is like poetry - timeless and universal."

Poet-painter Gulam Rasool Santosh, who comes from the beautiful Kashmir valley, was born in 1929, in a middle class family. He once said in an interview, "In Kashmir, art was taught in school after class V. But I remember drawing in class II, starting, at the onset, on a landscape which I liked so much that I concentrated on landscapes, doing several of these before I changed... "Painting to me is like poetry - timeless and universal."

Poet-painter Gulam Rasool Santosh, who comes from the beautiful Kashmir valley, was born in 1929, in a middle class family. He once said in an interview, "In Kashmir, art was taught in school after class V. But I remember drawing in class II, starting, at the onset, on a landscape which I liked so much that I concentrated on landscapes, doing several of these before I changed my style."

He completed his matriculation in 1945, with painting as a subject but was forced to give up the thought of further studies because of his father’s death. Santosh took up several odd jobs like signboard painting, silk weaving and whitewashing walls to support himself. Slowly, he began concentrating on commercial art and became a skilful papier-mache artist. In 1950, Santosh joined the Progressive Arts Association in Kashmir, formed as a result of artist S H Raza's efforts to mobilise Kashmiri painters. Santosh exhibited across India as a member of this association. In 1954, he won the government scholarship to study Fine Arts under the tutelage of artist N S Bendre at the MS University, Baroda.

In his early years, Santosh was greatly influenced by geometric shapes and the mysticism of the Kashmir valley. His treatment of snow-clad houses and the backwaters on the banks of river Jhelum reveals his finely tuned sense of visual perception and is an example of splendid semi-abstract treatment. Although Santosh began by painting landscapes, he was gradually influenced by Cubism and switched over to creating Cubist landscapes, a theme for which he is very popular now. Says Shabir, his son, who is also an artist, "Even though he was influenced by Cubism, one could feel the emotional attachment my father had for his native place, which allowed him to give a refreshing treatment to his work."

In 1964, a visit to the Amarnath temple proved another turning point for the artist and he stopped painting to study Tantra (mysticism) and Kashmir Shaivism (a sect of Shiva followers). Later, inspired by the Tantra philosophy, he combined the male and female form and finally worked round to paint a pure image of the human form, leaving out the face, hands, and feet. For a while, therefore, his subjects came to be dominated by the Shiv-Shakti.

The artist's contribution to Tantric art spearheads the movement in the art world. In a series of seventeen paintings he did in the 1970s, Santosh portrays the chronic, indefinable solitude and loneliness that plagues the modern man. One critic describes the artist's style and imagination to be "of the landscape of the heart rather than of any geographical region." The paintings were done in translucent colours of red, black and white.

Since 1953, Santosh has held over thirty one-man shows. In 1973, he received the Lalit Kala Akademi award and the Padma Shri in 1977.

The artist passed away in 1997 in New Delhi.

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