The Art by Dr Ved Prakash Bhardwaj - HTML preview

The Art

deliberately avoid such fixed directions. This cover or suppress identifiable images so that his is why his visual poetry appears even more forms can function as pure forms rather than

mysterious.

representations of recognizable objects.

Kolte often uses geometric shapes in Prabhakar Kolte was born in 1946 in Nerurpar, in his paintings, but these forms are frequently Ratnagiri district, Maharashtra. He received his incomplete, like a poet leaving a line of verse

Diploma from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, unfinished. Just as an unfinished poetic line can in 1968 and taught there from 1972 to 1984. His open up an infinity of meanings, Kolte’s incomplete career as a painter and teacher has made him an

lines and geometric forms leave possibilities important figure in the development of modern open to the viewer. The painting does not end and contemporary Indian art.

where the artist’s brush stops; it continues in the Kolte’s art can be understood as an art of

imagination of the person looking at it.

seeing the invisible. His paintings do not contain The experiments Kolte conducted during

scenes in the conventional narrative sense. There the early stages of his career continue to be

is no identifiable form that leads the viewer

remembered and remain important to the history

toward a particular story. He has expressed this of Indian abstraction. He is regarded as one of

philosophy in the memorable statement: “I don’t

the most significant abstract painters working

see and paint, but I paint and see.”

in India, and the intellectual dimension of his art To see and paint is to reproduce what

is particularly striking. His early canvases are exists before the eyes—to begin with a visible,

often characterized by a single dominant colour

external experience. Kolte rejects this as the

in the background, over which lighter and more

primary purpose of painting. Instead, he follows complex forms—both geometric and organic—are

a more difficult path, one in which the invisible placed. In discussing his approach to abstraction, world becomes more compelling than the visible Kolte has emphasized the need to immediately

one. What is unknown and unseen attracts us

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