Important Notice

"Still life as a genre of painting in India was to come into its own with Krishnaji Howlaji Ara," says Yashodhara Dalmia in the essay "The Stillness of Life: Krishnaji Howlaji Ara." A self-taught artist, Ara's association with the Progressive Artists' Group likely heightened his innate modernist sensibilities and led him to discover his own unique painterly vocabulary. "Ara's ceaseless experiments with bowls, fruits and vases with flowers were... "Still life as a genre of painting in India was to come into its own with Krishnaji Howlaji Ara," says Yashodhara Dalmia in the essay "The Stillness of Life: Krishnaji Howlaji Ara." A self-taught artist, Ara's association with the Progressive Artists' Group likely heightened his innate modernist sensibilities and led him to discover his own unique painterly vocabulary. "Ara's ceaseless experiments with bowls, fruits and vases with flowers were to develop a compositional syntax to which he lent a rugged buoyancy and an unremitting compassion. His singular achievement lay in coalescing these elements into a distinctive style, which made quite an impact on the period." (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 129)

After a brief exploration in figuration, Ara turned towards still life and object painting around the late 1940s, with particular emphasis on flower and vase studies, as seen in the present lot. A striking aspect of his still life paintings was the deliberate roughness he employed in both drawing and painting. The paint often appeared to overflow from one object to another, ultimately bringing the composition into a unity. Although he mostly dabbled in watercolour, Ara developed a unique technique by applying colours straight from the tube and painting in a dry impasto method that made his work look like an oil painting. "Ara's achievement lay in fusing a raw sensuality with a calculated structuring, thereby revitalizing the entire still life genre. He constantly experimented with paint to acquire what he describes as the 'honest expression of form.' There is a rough, uneven, jagged look to all his still life paintings, with minimal attention to details, which distinguishes his work from others." (Dalmia, p. 134)

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