New Delhi: Jamini Roy, an Indian painter, has been honoured with a Google Doodle tribute on his birth anniversary celebrated on Aprill 11.
On the 130th birth anniversary of Roy, search engine giant Google placed an image inspired by his Black Horse painting.
The artist was born in 1887 into a moderately prosperous family of land-owners in Beliatore village of the Bankura district, West Bengal.
From the age of sixteen, he started learning to paint initiating from drawing Classical nudes and painting in oils and in 1908 he received his Diploma in Fine Art from a Kolkata-based college. But when it was time for Roy to develop his style of art, he returned to the folk and craft of his homeland. Thus, he looked to the living folk and tribal art for inspiration.
He began experimenting with folk art. For inspiration, he turned back towards his own district, painted his own people thus honing his craft. It is this work that brought Mr Roy both national and international recognition. His work included not just paintings but also wooden sculptures rooted in the village culture that shaped his early years.
Some of his notable works include Gopini, Three Pujarans, Standing woman, Bengali Woman among many others. Many of these can be viewed in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
In creating his own world of art, Roy found inspiration in Kalighat pat (Kalighat paintings), traditional kanthas and alpanas. The use of bright colours with bold sweeping brush-strokes defined his art.
The famous painter Roy, preferred himself to be called a ‘patua’. His paintings were put on the exhibition for the first time in the British India Street of Kolkata (then Calcutta) in 1938.
Later his works crossed the national boundary and in 1946 it was exhibited in London followed by the New York City in 1953.
His popular works include ‘Mother and the Child’, which is an image of a Santhal woman embracing her child.
A bronze-bodied Santhal mother feeding an infant and outlined figures reflecting maternal love added a glorious chapter in the life of this master folk modernist.
