But in a conversation that lasted an hour, it is evident that Kumar, at 81, prefers to expend his energy dissecting his own works as an intellectual pursuit. He disassembles, dismembers, rearranges and rebuilds his old paintings. He treats work as a habit and continues to create fresh works with an age-defying vitality. "Most artists' productivity starts waning with age, but not Kumar's," commented one.
One of the seminal painters of the post-independent era, Kumar, a Masters in Economics from St Stephen's College (he barely lasted a year in a bank job, and as a translator with The Hindustan Times), treats his chosen vocation with a disciplinary approach.
"If there is some weakness I can't eliminate in a particular work, I'd like not to repeat it in the next canvas. But you have to be alert as you could have 10 options and have to know that you have chosen the right one," he says.
In the past six decades since his first work in 1946, Kumar thinks discipline has kept him going. "If I wait for inspiration to come to paint, I'll never come to my studio," he explains.
From his figurative paintings in the forties and fifties, to the angular figuratives between 1954-58, to the abstract works in the sixties when he executed the famed 'Varanasi' series, Kumar has built a reputation for not just being a "simple and silent man devoid of gimmickry" but also someone who has remained true to his conviction about his artistic conceptions.
For one, he's the only painter other than V S Gaitonde, who did not return to figurative painting after several of his contemporaries embraced abstract painting in the sixties.Today, his 'Varanasi' and the 'Landscape' series, inspired once by the city formations of Ladakh and Machu Picchu, have become brands, fetching record prices at auctions.
Kumar, however, finds it disturbing that works change hands for the purpose of commerce only. "Nobody today wants to know what goes on behind the picture. People superficially read about the monetary part," he says.
What, however, is little known is that Ram Kumar, who is the brother of Hindi writer Nirmal Verma, is that he has been writing short stories in Hindi. After his return from studying painting in Paris with Andre Lhote in 1952, Kumar wrote his first stories Ghar Bane Ghar Toote, based on the refugee colony in Karol Bagh.
But paintings continued to draw him, and as Kumar admits, he "paints more than he reads these days". But the forlorn figures continued to dominate his works through the fifties, such as in The Poor and Sorrow.
Kumar says that he has never been interested in politics but has had a brush with "the politics of art". He was a member of the Delhi Shipli Chakra along with others such as Dhanraj Bhagat, set up as an answer to the conservatism propounded by the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society in Delhi.
Today, however, he says he has far outgrown the stage where he wants to show or sell his work. " I want to now live with them and see them around me," he says.
