Important Notice

"Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation. Horizons widen and recede, and I see myself as a pilgrim, moving towards unknown vistas" (as quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p. 216).

Since his first solo show at the Taj Mahal... "Painting for me grows more personalised, more difficult. Movements, styles, the topical moments, all lose out to the attempt to reach deeper levels of interpretation. Horizons widen and recede, and I see myself as a pilgrim, moving towards unknown vistas" (as quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Eminence Designs Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, 2005, p. 216).

Since his first solo show at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, in 1951, Jehangir Sabavala's painterly career has evolved and flourished. Today, with more than sixty years of painting behind him, Sabavala does not pause to survey the past, but continues to push forward in his artistic quest to find lyricism and serenity in a seemingly irredeemable world. Describing Sabavala's work, art critic Edward Gage wrote, "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, an almost mystic seascape, Sabavala notes, "It was a period [in my career] 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. 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" (correspondence with the artist, February and August, 2011).

"The Inland Seas II forms a part of three paintings inspired by the Arabian Sea coastline that stretches alongside the immense length of Western India. Sometimes I have concentrated more on the sea and the inroads it makes carving up the shore. Here, it is much more dune and sand and vista of low lying land - monochromatic in its duns, beiges and browns, contoured by sandy beaches" (Ibid.).

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