A lasting affair with art
SIX DECADES OF WORK BY ARTIST SURYA PRAKASH, HAVE BEEN COMPILED INTO A BOOK THAT PAYS RICH TRIBUTES TO THE CONTEMPORARY PAINTER
An artist par excellence, Surya Prakash has been hailed as one of the leading contemporary painters of the Indian art circuit. Known for his abstract expressionism, and drawing inspiration from artists like Vasudev Gaintonde, Akbar Padamsee and Ramkumar, the painter has consciously portrayed his dissent against figuration — a common practice in the Indian schools of art.
Surya Prakash’s inclination towards abstraction was not isolated and his paintings have always depicted a beautiful medley of abstract forms with seeming reality, giving birth to the genre of abstract reality. The artist’s entire body of work over six decades has been compiled into a book titled Abstract Reality.
From humble beginnings in Madhira (in current day Telangana), his place of birth, Surya began his journey in art from Hyderabad’s College of Fine Arts in 1956. Art for him though, was an accidental miracle. The now acclaimed painter turned to landscapes for solace when his modest grades in his intermediate examination could not secure him a position in any of Hyderabad’s well known colleges. When an uncle dragged him to Baroda to have him admitted into the art course, Surya Prakash was not the most excited. Art was about personal pleasure and remains that to date. But it was Professor Divya Bhushan who pushed his limits to work through the otherwise bland theory classes, to discover his love for landscapes.
As seen in his works of art, the painter managed to redefine the meaning of conventional landscape. Be it his earliest sketches of the dingy lanes of Hyderabad’s old city, to his recent gardens of cherry blossom. The 1960s were marked with bold strokes, muted colour palettes and surreal representations of daily objects and scenery. However progressing towards the 1980s, one can spot the obvious change in strokes, colour palettes, elements and composition.
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