Important Notice

An accomplished draughtsman and painter, Ganesh Pyne's artistic vocabulary has both "…self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one's mind, where it explodes like a conceptual... An accomplished draughtsman and painter, Ganesh Pyne's artistic vocabulary has both "…self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one's mind, where it explodes like a conceptual mine that has been activated by contact. Of course, there is also an occluded playfulness that inhabits Pyne's more apparent melancholia: his secrecy follows a method of allusion, but his references can be made to unknown or invented sources, giving his allegory an edge of unpredictability" (Ranjit Hoskote, "Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne", Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Galerie 88, Mumbai, 2005, p. 16).

In the present lot, Pyne offers his viewers a shadowy scene, partially illuminated by an oil lamp. In the flickering lamplight, two mysterious figures are revealed against the rock wall: the first a robed mendicant with a mask-like countenance, who carries the lamp, and the second his hybrid companion, with the head of a man and the body and wings of a bird. Using translucent layers of tempera to heighten the eerie atmosphere, Pyne also demonstrates his command of chiaroscuro, patterning and texturing of the painted surface. Reflecting on the artist's choice of medium, Hoskote notes, "Neither oil nor watercolour satisfied him: their range of effects was neither sumptuous enough on the one hand, nor ethereal enough on the other, to convey his particular atmospheres. He wished to work in a medium that was equally free of opacity and transparency. It was in the teaching and practice of Nandalal Bose, the Shilpacharya, as he was known, that Pyne found the medium that he was to adopt as his own: tempera, using fine medical gum as the binder for ground pigment. Tempera gave Pyne both crispness of line and a sense of depth, the necessary illusion of volume as well as a sense of idyllic lightness" (Ibid. p. 13).

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