Face to Face With Gulam Rasool Santosh

The present effort aims to understand the personality of Padma Shree awardee Gulam Rasool Santosh, a modern Indian artist - an individual, possessing multidimensional personality, with a natural approach to life. An avid colourist and ceaselessly inventive artist, Santosh was in the vanguard of Neo- Tantric waves in modern Indian painting. To present a total view of the development of his journey as an artist, an effort has been made to focus on the aspect that for him the plastic- visual possibilities of Tantric art were far more important than the Tantric philosophy. Initially, his deep love for Cezanne and the cubist treatment of the pictorial space is evident in his works. Later an attempt has been made to express the artist's effort to create "the colourless through colour and the formless through form".