By the late 1960s, Gaitonde’s creative process had been perfected into a lyrical yet tightly controlled one, where the artist painstakingly created and manipulated colour, light and space through the play of pigments across the surface. Describing this development Nadkarni notes, “The creating of texture in an unconventional way, the use of thick lugubrious pigment, the evocation of light and finally, the subtle balancing of the image on the canvas as if it were undulating on water and gradually surfacing in the light, all these are attainments of a time when the individual canvases may not be too distinctive” (Gaitonde, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1983, not paginated).

A stickler for process and perfection, Gaitonde’s work was always meticulous, and his output far from prolific. Contemplating his process, he once noted, “Painting is a struggle – you have to enquire, you have to have a thinking mind…A painting always exists within you, even before you actually start to paint. You just have to make yourself the perfect machine to express what is already there” (as quoted in Meera Menezes, “The Meditative Brushstroke”, Art India, Volume 3, Issue 3, 1998, p. 69).

This canvas, painted in 1968, illustrates the immaculate way in which Gaitonde was able to control light and shade through pigment, with its translucent layers and subtle gradations of blues and greens running from a darker and more heavily worked on central band to its brighter blue upper and lower margins, and finally to a lucent, almost fluid frame.

By the late 1960s, Gaitonde’s creative process had been perfected into a lyrical yet tightly controlled one, where the artist painstakingly created and manipulated colour, light and space through the play of pigments across the surface. Describing this development Nadkarni notes, “The creating of texture in an unconventional way, the use of thick lugubrious pigment, the evocation of light and finally,