Important Notice

Practicing in the modernist mode, Jehangir Sabavala has been carefully constructing tranquil and infinite land and seascapes out of precise wedges of colour for several decades now. It is his intention, in these paintings, not to convey the physical attributes of a place, but rather to communicate its intangible character through his muted palette and unique visual vocabulary. Reviewing an exhibition of his work, the art critic Edward Gage... Practicing in the modernist mode, Jehangir Sabavala has been carefully constructing tranquil and infinite land and seascapes out of precise wedges of colour for several decades now. It is his intention, in these paintings, not to convey the physical attributes of a place, but rather to communicate its intangible character through his muted palette and unique visual vocabulary. Reviewing an exhibition of his work, the art critic Edward Gage described these landscapes, writing, “Sabavala is a poet who distils the essence of his native landscapes and atmospheres into a semiabstract form that is actually refined, highly controlled and quite original. Within a deliberate austerity that approaches asceticism, he sums up the quality of the light, the climate, the stillness, the mystery, the whole vastness of the place…” (The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 1969).

Speaking about the present lot, a serene beach scene executed in 1975, Sabavala notes, “It was a period when I sought out the beaches, coves, and estuaries of the coastline north of Bombay – both physically and metaphorically speaking. To the South, the landscape grows lush and colourful. But it was the upper reaches of the Arabian Sea that fired my imagination. The distilled colour and the near abstraction of form threw me a painterly challenge” (correspondence with the artist, February, 2011).

“I was enthralled by the subtly graded tonal quality of land, sea, and sky, drained of colour. I discovered an amazing range of shades that lay just beneath the surface – a world in which everything fuses but the focal point is never lost. A series of paintings emerged one after the other in those distant years, and in each canvas, I strove to reach that visionary other shore” (Ibid.).

Dilip Chitre believes that this painting, like many other works by the artist, transforms “landscape into mindscape”. He notes, “Here is an example of Sabavala expressing his solitude through boats abandoned in muddy tidal waters lapping a curved beach, the bone-dry sand, the dark rocks of the foreground resonating with the dark line of hills and grey clouds in a bleached –blue sky. This kind of true eye for physical environment and the craft to portray it would finally not amount to much, without that particular factor which transforms such a place into one’s private world, one’s own place” (The Reasoning Vision: Jehangir Sabavala’s Painterly Universe, Tata McGraw-Hill, New Delhi, 1980, p. 70).

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