The bhadralok artist

Lalu Prasad Shaw swings beautifully between two extremes in his works - but he hasn't let success affect him.

In his light green shirt, hanging free of his tailored serge trousers, thinning grey hair brushed firmly back and large, '70s era glasses, Lalu Prasad Shaw is a picture of the Bengali urban, respectable, middle-class bhadralok.

The gentle mien, soft-spoken and smiling, is also in character. There's no whiff in Shaw's demeanour of the artist who's deemed one of the foremost among the Bengal school painters living. He has none of the spit and polish of success, or even the angst or over-intellectualism of some of his brethren.

Indeed, as we walk around the 120-odd paintings hung around the Visual Arts Gallery in New Delhi "" a retrospective of works starting with pencil sketches and water colours from the '50s when he was a student at the Government College of Art and Crafts, Kolkata, to the Contes he's been using lately "" speaking of his career and the development of his style over the decades, one gets a feeling of the almost workmanlike ethic that Shaw brings to his painting.

Here's his description of how he came to develop the slightly satirical, cameo-like two-dimensional portraits of men and women in a kind of Kalighat pata-cum-Company painting mould:

"As a student, we were copying the masters, trying out many styles. You'll find traces of the Impressionists, Matisse in some of my works. From about the '60s, especially when I was teaching print-making at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, I concentrated primarily on prints. It was only later, from the '80s onwards, as I found that it would take a lot of time for prints to find a market in our country, that I turned to tempera. The Kalighat pata, especially Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy's contemporary reworkings of them, were on my mind. I also felt that without the touch of our native traditions, my work would have no meaning. Besides my exposure to art was the Malakar community that lived near our house in Siuri, whom I'd visit and sit watching for hours as they painted their patas."

However much Shaw may have become popular for his temperas (and there's something striking still about his early temperas from the '80s and early '90s, as much for their wit as their vivid colours and delicate brush-stokes, as compared to the simpler figures and bold colours of his far prettier later works), it is clearly the graphics that Shaw holds dear, and which critics too rate very highly.

A number of his etchings, woodcuts, lithographs (in B&W and colour), linocuts were included in the show named "Myriad Minded Artist", to reflect the book with the same name on the artist written by art historian Sovon Som which was released on the occasion: "To me what distinguishes Shaw is the fact that he can work with two mediums, keeping to the rules of each medium so wonderfully. His prints are abstracts, geometrical, almost as a reflection of the architectural symmetry of the city of Kolkata. Conversely, when he moves to Santiniketan, his paintings become figurative, almost lyrical. It's like a pendulum which swings between two extremes but comes back to a mean."

Many of them are rare, the last remaining piece of an edition of five or eight. "He doesn't want to sell them," says Ambica Beri of Gallery Sanskriti who organised the show.

Ask Shaw and he shrugs, "They are a lot of hard work and I'm too old and frail. Beside, where's the space for it in my flat in Salt Lake?"