Strokes of sensuality

Keshav Roy explores sensual nudity for his sweet and ugly women figures.

Maybe having a lineage of art patrons (grandfather being sculptor Maharaj Kumar Robin Roy) does give artist Keshav Roy "an innate creative instinct" he suggests, adding, "but you never know when that instinct will hit you".

As Roy exhibits in Delhi for the first time with his nudescapes of, mostly, women, he tells us on a sultry morning accentuated by Delhi's power cuts that he took a reasonable amount of time "" studying business in various schools and countries "" before taking the plunge to feed that genetic creative instinct.

In his business school days, Roy started by exhibiting realistic horses, dominantly in acrylic, as he recalls being in complete awe with the animal's beauty and speed.

He claims they generated a reasonably good response but were smaller sized works. Roy has a notion that a larger sized work is more impressive, and the market is ready to pay a premium for it. So, as the young artist scouted for his forte, he sensed that his temperamental comfort with a medium also required gelling with a style that was not common enough.

"Nowadays everybody is doing everything, so the simplest method in the ball game was to bring about an art form that was forgotten," says Roy.

Seeking simplicity in his works, Roy started working with charcoal, drawing portraits. He's moved on to a style that is abstract figurative, distorted and even realistic at times.

The women in his charcoal and conte works are drawn with rounded strokes; they are voluptuous and full figured but not necessarily great looking. But always sensitively sensual.

"Sweet and ugly," is what Roy terms them adding, "female nudes are far more tasteful than male nudes". Some works like his 'A Higher Love' depicting a mother and child's face with a few rounded stokes also show the strength of his line, able to evoke the mother-child love; the spontaneity of working style evident. His works are not deficient of colour he reasons, "as I see 50 shades of black and white each".

But even as Roy tries to keep his work as minimalist as possible, he does add a hint of colour "" ochre conte merged with charcoal or a dash of acrylic sometimes "to break the monotony", he says.

For the time being Roy plans to a stick to a recognisable form "" nude backs, torsos for his mixed media and even bronze sculpture. He turns the long discussions he's had with art patrons as his schooling in art.

"Somehow the aesthetic value of art is not taught at art schools," he feels. Nor does he believe in signing his works. Fascinated with the oriental way of signing works, he scribbles horizontally across his canvases, and plans to get a proper seal for to mark them with his impression.

Gallerist Purnima Dhawan of Gallery 302 feels, "Roy's works are most innovative where the lines speaks for themselves."

For his curvaceous nudescapes, Roy quips that maybe it's the men who pay for it "" "take back a woman home tonight?"