In love with the distorted face

Sanat Kar's figurative works seek "joyful sorrow" in their rhythmic lines.

I am a traveller in the field of visual arts," says artist Sanat Kar over a long distance call from his house in Santiniketan.

His voice sounds young, not indicative of the five decades he has spent as painter, teacher and experimenter in arts since he graduated from the Government College of Arts and Craft in Kolkata in 1955.

Kar speaks passionately about intaglio, the Italian print making process that he adopted in the 1970s since it was interesting and new then, but not in its pure form.

He innovated by replacing the metal plates of the printer with plywood, then laminated boards and even cardboard stiffened with synthetic glue. "And all of them produced the finest of lines in the prints," says Kar proudly.

Kar's temperas are distinct in form and in technique. "I am a modern man," he says. He rejected the traditional binding glue used for temperas in favour of newer options like Fevicol mixed with water that, according to him, gave his temperas a different kind of surface texture.

To this he applies only colour powder. Even as Kar experimented with mediums and techniques, his penchant for rhythmic lines in his artworks "" be it etchings, temperas, acrylic, oils or bronze sculptures "" remained the same.

"Line takes us to rhythm, so linearity infuses a subdued rhythmic structure in my works," explains Kar, adding, "As I believe in form, I try to invent different kinds of forms."

His figurative works prominently depict the human face. The reason he gives for repeatedly painting the human face is a love for his fellow beings, and it appears that even formless objects conjure a human face for Kar "" such as in an abandoned table napkin in which Kar found a wonderful "face".

He confesses to being a romantic "" so people and nature are bound to find way into his works, though he's ceased to paint floral images, something he did in the early years.

But Kar's images of the human form are never the whole, represented only in part, mostly as a face and hands, where the torso either seems to fade away in the background or accommodates several faces.

These faces are drawn in fluid lines "" the big and expressive eyes with the nose and lips drawn disproportionately bigger than the body.

The imagification of the face depicts distinct moods "" awe, curiosity, innocence, even melancholy. Sometimes the faces combine the sun and moon to form spatial configurations. "All the time I try to reach the other world," he says.

The face found its way into mundane painted objects like jars, cushions or vases too. "I imagined myself returning to my loved ones and earthly surroundings after death," says Kar, recalling the Ikebana series where he philosophised about leaving the world to realise that he never wanted to leave it "" the "joyful sorrow", he says, of everything in the world that he likes to paint.

Art collector and gallerist Tripat Kalra of Gallerie Nvya, who has been collecting

Kar's works for a while, feels "his works are a collector's delight where the technique is phenomenal, and not attempted by many artists these days".