Stop telling me about the Indian abstracts. Show me the paintings already! I was just over at Artinfo.com and I read this. “Housewives (in India) are beginning to divert money into works of art instead of jewelry.” Sounds like a Gertrude Stein recommendation. (Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Gertrude Stein, but I think she was wise to put aside fashionable clothes to buy more paintings instead.)
Artinfo.com mentions that Ram Kumar’s work has “doubled in value”. I decided to take a look. As usual, I used Google’s image search. I found some interesting Ram Kumar paintings at the Glenbarra Art Museum in Japan. Let’s talk about this one:
This Ram Kumar painting is in oil on canvas, from 1982. It looks like an abstract landscape, invented or maybe painted from life. A horizontal format like this works best when you keep moving your lines all the way across. With longer paintings, if you get too vertical you break up the picture too much and you end up with two paintings instead of the one you had originally planned. Notice this painting almost stops vertically in two places, but it keeps moving left and right, just enough to keep it interesting.
Sometimes all you need is boxes with simple rectangles for doors to suggest houses settled in the landscape. In this case, Kumar’s boxes/rectangles come along with stairs and steepled rooftops. It’s like you’re face to face with a little town. The few diagonal elements give the picture space. But, the vanishing point wobbles around the picture, introducing another reality. This shifting perspective adds to the painting’s shimmer.
What else? When you look at the little vertical rectangles, there appears to be a “Gustav Klimt” influenced pattern. But look deeper. This painting has a closer connection with Klimt’s contemporary: Egon Schiele. Here’s an Egon Schiele landscape that I’ve flipped over (and I adjusted the color slightly) so you can more easily compare these two compositions:
Good abstract painting is very hard to find. I’m always excited when I find a new artist that interests me. And I’m not suggesting that Ram Kumar paints just like Egon Schiele. Like most artists, I enjoy finding similarities between works.
So, to understand Ram Kumar better, I will need to look at more of his paintings. But my first impression? In his work I see Marcel Duchamp, some John Marin, and like I said, Egon Schiele.