The Woman

Kartick Chandra Pyne was born in 1931 in Kolkata, and received his Diploma in Fine Arts from the College of Arts and Crafts in the same city. Pyne was an artist much ahead of his times. Whilst his contemporaries were still experimenting with impressionistic and post impressionistic styles and techniques on their canvases and painted under the influence of Gauguin and Cezanne`s works, Kartick Pyne was taken up by the aesthetics of the post cubistic European idiom. Artists like Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miro inspired him, and he was one of the few Indian painters who in breaking away from tradition, demonstrated that the Indian art scene at that time was stagnating and its products redundant. At the time Pyne began to paint professionally, the common stress was on realism. Everyone was painting the rational and the beautiful. He tried to paint according to what was expected of an artist then for some time, but the pioneer in him made Pyne begin to introduce irrational elements in his work and start to express his feelings on canvas without any inhibitions. Kartick Pyne did not allow himself to be limited by only painting what was real, and therefore acceptable. In this artist`s work we see the use of inscrutable and complicated metaphors, that only he can explain, and what critics called "free form images." Pyne was concerned with the spiritual, and in his trademark canvases we see an almost automatic outpouring of all that he is feeling. He chooses his colours not on the basis of their visual appeal, but by what they mean to him. The random and surreal elements in his works are all rooted in his own perception of the world and its people. Pyne, who is the elder brother of renowned modernist Ganesh Pyne, has held several solo shows in India and he has participated in several exhibitions internationally, including `100 Years of Modern Indian Art` held in the Fukuoka Museum, Japan in 1979 and the exhibition of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations in Bangladesh, held in 1992. The artist lives and workes in Kolkata.