| Born 1937
Ganesh Pyne is known for his small tempera paintings, rich in imagery and symbols. He is one of India’s foremost contemporary painters today. He acknowledges the influence of great painters like Abanindranath Tagore, Hals Rembrandt and Paul Klee. But he says that his exposure to Walt Disney’s cartoons and his own experience as a young animator, in Calcutta, finally liberated him and helped him develop two important stylistic features - distortion and exaggeration. He uses these to explore the deep recesses of his fantastical imagination to create uncanny images of disquieting creatures. The artist draws his inspiration from Bengal’s rich storehouse of folklore and mythology, stories that his grandmother told him in his childhood. The painter blends romanticism, fantasy and free form and an inventive play of light and shade to create a world of ‘poetic surrealism’. In the Indian miniature tradition, Pyne’s paintings should be savoured slowly and at leisure. Ganesh Pyne can be described as being ‘an artist’s artist, a philosopher’s philosopher and master fantasist of them all’.
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