Animesh Roy

Animesh Roy is inspired by the furious passion of Van Gogh, the adventure and grit in Papillon and Robert Louis Stevenson, Messner for being alone with the mountains, the total irreverence and bohemia of Henry Miller, rebellious youths in The Wild One, “What are you rebelling against? What’ve you got?”, the sublime serenity of Tagore and Ray, and courage and greatness of the Mahatma.
Born in one of the most artistic places in Bengal, Krishnagar, famous for its clay sculptures, Roy has been crisscrossing since a child as his parents had transferable jobs. A sense of adventure was instilled in him as a child through treks in the Himalayas — “Walking down to Saat Taal and getting lost on the way back in the darkness.....”
Inspiration comes from adventure, travel, meeting people, visiting villages, monasteries, temples, churches, mosques, and graveyards. He would not be able to work in the confines of a comfortable city studio. Though many of his works do get physically done in a studio — the germs are born on the road, while traveling, soaking in.
Roy has been a rebel and a traveller and his natural skills are completely untrained. His artistic growth did get stunted from four years of exile in the Delhi College of Art, trying to get a meaningless ‘art degree’. He planned for a ‘break’ like Papillon succeeding with two back to back solo shows just out of college in 1992. Earning the ire of the art critics and his art college professors!
Since then Roy has had six solo shows in major Indian cities.
Roy traveled to Ladakh in 1995 in the comforts of an aircraft and called it — Travels with a Donkey — an R. L. Stevenson travelogue. He did some 100 drawings in and around Leh.
Then in 1997 onwards he went into a hiatus — reading, learning how to drive and traveling furiously whenever his budget would allow — Nepal, Bhutan, America, Sikkim, Gahrwal, Himachal, Rajasthan, Kutch, UP, Bengal, Goa, Madras. He stopped painting and exhibiting, cutting himself off from the ‘art world’. But continued quietly to do pen-and-ink drawings of places visited.
From 1996-2004 Roy did extensive pen-and-ink drawing of Delhi’s ruins: Mehrauli, Tughlakhabad, Adilabad, Sri, Sultan Ghari, Old Delhi etc., while constantly planning his next trip to Leh by road via Manali a distance of over 3,000 km from Delhi and back.
In 2004 he went back to Ladakh, this time traveling alone in his jeep, battling severe high altitude sickness, driving through some of the world’s highest altitude roads and passes. He paints this time.
Early 2006 — he visited Banares — and came back to his studio in Delhi to produce some 30 odd paintings in acrylics on canvas mostly inspired by the spring and summer of Delhi and a new found joy in his heart.
Roy is back to his first love — painting.

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The summer of 2006 Roy went back to the Himalayas… the Kullu Valley in Himachal Pradesh. Painting the waterfalls and mountainscapes on acrylics on canvas. By the time monsoon came he was back to the planes painting the fields in the villages around Delhi. During this time Roy finally switched to oils… a medium till now avoided by him due to the fear that it was not suited to his temperament! Many wise men had advised him against using oils!! But lately Roy was very unhappy with the results of Acrylic paints.. ‘It’s too muddy and there’s no sparkle’. So he started oils. Initially it was difficult to work outdoors with oils but he has adapted and has been working since in Oils.
Roy went to Poland in 2007. It was early spring and the earth was coming back to life after a harsh winter... everyday fresh blades of grass and wild flowers would spurt... soon the landscape was flooded with flowering tress, shrubs, herbs... it was difficult to keep pace with ever-changing landscape.. before you could decide and go back to a spot the flowers have gone and  was greeted by something new!
He spent about six months in Poland. Traveling and painting. By the time he packed his easel and paints, he had finished about sixty odd works during his sojourn. Most of the works were done in plein air and when the weather would turn too rough for outdoors, he would do some still life indoors.
Why Poland? Heart has its reason which the mind can’t fathom....

The Year of The Image-Maker
Triveni Gallery, New Delhi
... and it is often a simple image, like that of Animesh Roy’s ‘The Fall’ that I saw at Triveni Gallery, that perseveres, as it bridges the gap between matter and ideas, between texture, line and images, and leaves one with a feeling that one has experienced something that reminds one that ultimately it is not people who are immortal, their actions are.
Suneet Chopra
The Hindustan Times, New Delhi. July 30, 1994

Exploring The Medium
M.E.C. Art Gallery, New Delhi
Over the past two decades acrylic, the aqueous medium, has lent itself to a wide range of use by painters, often replacing the oil. The transparent watercolour is not pliable for the slap-dab, thick impasto technique, nor is the opaque gouache, another aqueous medium, capable of retaining the kind of thickness the painters want for speedy gestural brushwork. The varying thickness of acrylic paint can create a lively pattern of surface tension parallel to colours and their varying values. It looks very much like the oil paint, only much cheaper. Some painters can achieve highly consistent and uniform colour filed with acrylic, which is not that easy in transparent watercolour, and gouache will often leave marks of the brush bristle. That is another extreme of the use of acrylic colours.
The 40 medium-small size acrylic landscapes of Animesh Roy, now on view at the M.E.C. Art Gallery, Khan Market, show the young painter’s control over the medium, and his profound concern for the effects of light on nature. He has titled the present series — his first solo show in the Capital — ‘On the Roads’, and most of the landscapes were painted on location: The deep woodlands, the forest path lighted up by the sunlight seeping through the leaves of tall trees, the dramatic diagonals of dipping slope sheltering a few wild flowers, the rough stone boulders, and sometimes little towns on mountain tops. Animesh brings in lively linear patterns of light, which also define the undulating topography of the land, with the butt-end of the brush, displacing the thick layer of paints — a very familiar technique even with artists who paint in transparent watercolour or in oil.
What is important in the landscapes is the total avoidance of any photographic references which we often note with dismay even in paintings of highly rated watercolourists. He paints with a breezy brush, loaded with thick paint catching the ephemeral poetry of colour and light through changing seasons in the woodlands. And he varies the direction of the brush, sometimes in quick diagonals which mix grey, blue and black only to throw up the fleeting colours of wild flowers in hasty horizontals making the landscape almost semi-abstract. Evidently he is still exploring the pictorial poetry of the inspired impressionists. But in some paintings, for instance, the ‘Red Road’ and ‘Sunlit Path’, his treatment of colours shows the early expressionist painters’ mystic awareness of colours which often sent out to them signals of deeper psychological import. Strangely, when he paints the familiar geometry of small towns, Animesh seems to be rather heavy-handed, if not ham-handed, in wielding his brush and his perception of colours suddenly focuses on the drab and the insipid.
Santo Datta
The Hindu, New Delhi. October 5, 1992

By using acrylics straight from the jar without dilution, Animesh Roy (MEC Gallery) gets the thick impasto effect of oils and he has painted some delightful woodlands scenes, the foreground trees in clear detail, the background a warm flush of colours.
Krishna Chaitanya
The Hindustan Times, New Delhi. October 11, 1992

Animesh Roy is plucky. He travels, and transcribes the visited places on paper or canvas, in acrylic. Since these works still lean on nature in a big way, they are essentially descriptive. But as descriptions they stand well. Thus ‘Dark and Deep, Autumnal Woods’ (inspired by Robert Frost) as also the works suffused with pollen yellow. A good beginning, the artist should now muse on the types of landscape there may be.
Keshav Malik
The Times of India, New Delhi. October 22, 1992

Evocative Acrylics on Paper
Animesh Roy’s acrylics on oil sheets and canvas on view at MEC art gallery, evince interest for the young artist’s vertical, horizontal and diagonal approaches to composition. He is able to capture the essential inclinations of the character and terrain of landscape, to highlight its structural rhythms in an integrated combine of woods and rocks, harmoniously blending with scattered flourishes of flowers as though arranged by nature’s own impeccable moves. The work is marked by a sense of exploration as much as by revelation, which is indicated by suddenness of the find.
Animesh has a very sensitive soul and an eye for the soulful in nature, even if it is only pretty. The roadside finds are small little treasure troves that suddenly captivate the eye as you turn the bend in a hill road, opening out new and everchanging amplitudes of valleys, the down-going dimensions of declivities. Since, in all his compositions, he has remained near the road, there have been no stirrings of the mysterious, the sombre and the elevating. What he captures is the scale of the inner amplitudes and nature’s own method of setting off one colour against the other.
Quite often there is an effort to create texture, particularly where the brush leaves its own mark on the paper. The tempering of colours — greens, yellows and oranges with blues — competently generate a specific mood. Collective rhythms capture his heart as much as dignified individual gestures: the joy of a flower enjoying its lone splendour, its true being in the wider spaces to which it relates without difficulty. In works such as these, one notices the first intimations of metaphoric content of poetical quality. His works hold promise.
K.L. Kaul
The Statesman, New Delhi. October 21,1992

Study In Contrasts
Thematic realism, coupled with an imaginative treatment, dominate Animesh Roy’s paintings.
His work is a world of contrasts woven around the juxtaposition of warm earth colours, cool dark colours, of sharp light and shade, of movement versus stillness, violence versus serenity.
The charm of his paintings lies in not aiming at capturing the grave profoundity of life. His paintings have the allure of a somewhat star portrayal.
‘Autumnal Woods I’ and ‘II’ are a study of light and shade. The white and brown tree trunks with their dark green foliage make an effective foil for the lemon yellow fore-ground interspersed with orange. The effect created is not that of soft, dappled light filtering through the trees but the dazzling light of a clear day.
These are Animesh’s more effective impressionist works. It is to the artist’s credit that he has handled such strong colours so sensitively that the contrasts never turn into conflict.
The hectic energy witnessed in these paintings is missing in the ‘Tropical Bird Flower’ whose lush greens build up an atmosphere of tranquility, and a moist cool fecundity.
‘Lane I’ and ‘II’ are the depiction of the same composition in two modes that the artist has created through the use of two different treatments. Both are a portrayal of semi urban life of a road passing through red roofed houses. The focus on the lane is emphasised by the two figures walking on it.
‘Lane I’ has a rather deserted lonely look of cool dusk about it through the use of darker colours and lengthening shadow painted with even, soft brushstrokes while ‘Lane II’ uses thick coats of uneven strikes — vibrant colours bursting with vitality and energy.
Crimson and pink break through the green and brown undergrowth around the small stream in ‘Brook II’. The judicious use of otherwise overpowering colours like crimson, by the artist, relieves the oppresive gloom of the thick growth.
Animesh utilises oil colour technique to produce watercolour effects with acrylic colours in the waterfall.
The vividness of the artist’s palette emerges again in the ‘Yellow Wood’, a study in yellow, green and orange of fiery light permeating through the whole forest, reminiscent of unrelenting summer months of baked earth, dry leaves and blinding sun.
The road path is an idiom that is repeated throughout the selection on display as in ‘In the Woods’, ‘Untrodden Path’ and the ‘Red Road’. In the latter, the artist has tried to reduce the composition to two images painted with minimal brush work though not lacking in colour. The concept of the painting is interesting in its simplicity.
Animesh has shown amazing maturity in his treatment and imaginative conception. He has stuck to a simple but effective compositional structure using colour for balance.
The highlight of his work is the skill with which he has used texture to create the environment, using uneven strokes with thick colours for the creating contrasts and movement, a technique specially useful in acrylic, his chosen medium. He has reserved gentle brushwork for very few of his works that emphasise repose.
The young artist shows a lot of promise in the treatment of uncomplicated themes, infusing them with energy and movement.
Seema Bawa
The Pioneer, New Delhi. July 30, 1992

Lost In The Green Countryside
Very many factors have gone into making the young artist feel so strongly about nature. In nature he is as much attracted to the awe it evokes as to the peace it provides. A raging thunderstorm is as attractive as the quiet that follows. And this is what is effectively conveyed here in acrylics on canvas and oil sheets.
An exhibition of paintings by Animesh Roy was recently put up at the Capital’s MEC gallery. Called ‘On the Roads’ it consisted of some 40-odd works which the artist accomplished in the last three years while travelling through the countryside. Roy is a painter in mind and a poet at heart. Lot many of his works here are influenced in theme and titles by poetry in English.
‘Autumnal Leaves I’ is a fine work. Here nature is in fury. The raging storm is uprooting the smaller of the trees while the larger ones are just about able to withstand the impact. This is brought about by casual and thick strokes of dark brown, yellow and green. In contrast is another beautiful work ‘Lost in the Green I’ wherein nature has laid out a carpet of green all over, with a few small white flowers twinkling in between.
These small white flowers are a favourite of Roy’s and he has put these to good use, particularly in ‘Left Blooming Alone’ series and ‘In Between’. Occasionally the white flowers are replaced by orange ones, to an equal delight.
‘The Pathless Woods’ is the heart of a jungle. Blue sky yonder, with shrubs to the front and a few trees being gently ruffled by the blowing wind. Except for the irritant of a few red spots the picture captures the essence of the wild wood. The shades of green and brown are very effectively used.
‘Lane I’ and ‘II’ are deviations from the rest of the works here but are interesting compositions. The impression is that of an uphill countryside, quite desolate. The focus on the lane (I) is brought out by two figures walking on it and what seem to be deserted houses alongside. There is an eerie quiet about the place brought out by contrasting colours and lengthening shadows.
Roy’s works are marked by a definite spontaneity; an impulsiveness, which probably explains his choice of medium — acrylic. He finds oil tedious. Besides he’s essentially an outdoor artist — most at home when out of home. With acrylic you just ‘dip in and splash’, he says. This was his first solo show and one looks forward to more.
Shekhar Mehra
New Delhi Sunday, Herald, New Delhi. October 18, 1992

On the Roads
Animesh Roy took his first degree in the Fine Arts from the Delhi College of Art, a couple of years ago. He has lost no time in getting ‘on to the roads’ to observe life, absorb experiences and just as swiftly hold his first solo exhibition at the MEC gallery in Khan Market.
“I love travelling and there are very few picture places I have not seen,” says young Animesh proudly. His paintings, in sombre, acrylic colours and framed and priced moderately, zoom in on a little mauve flower or a string of white orchid blooms amidst a background of mild cerebral abstraction and fairly dense sanguine, wilderness. These belong to the series captioned ‘Left Blooming Alone’.
Among the other compositions, if you search, there will be a pencil thin silvery stream or one that is choked by Chinar leaves. Animesh has trekked far and wide and drunk of breath taking Himalayan scenes.
No 12 is ‘Lost in the Green’, but nowhere is Animesh lost or fumbling. His grip over the brush is firm and the colouration deep and disturbing. His palette knife has inured the credibility of texture and form of the rugged terrains that Animesh Roy has traversed.
Reminiscent of his southern sojourn and two vivid compositions of close ups of clusters of robust coconuts against palm fronds that splendidly fan out in burnished reds like a Diwali fire-crackers display.
‘The Red Road’ is just that. Red? Depicting violence? “Actually, in some areas in Bihar the mud is bright red. I just painted that.”
Another composition of brilliant red foliage was also something the young painter had seen in Himachal.
Animesh Roy has participated in many group shows and his watercolours are now on display at a gallery in Jor Bagh. He prefers acrylic because he cannot change his mind as the paint dries fast!
Animesh Roy is a very promising artist and may quite confidently venture into a little more abstraction in form and theme. His 47 compositions on display at the MEC gallery are proof of the youngster’s enormous talent.
Vasantha Iyer
Mid Day, Saturday, New Delhi. October 10, 1992

Group Exhibition at M.E.C. Art Gallery, New Delhi
One of the highlights of the exhibition are the works of Animesh Roy. His series ‘On the Road’ carry the artist’s fleeting impression of a journey in the country. Strong sunlight filters through the trees and spreads out on the metalled road, with a blurred effect that gives a sense of speed, somewhat like the Impressionists. White flowers in a bed of green, emerald green leaves and flowers in grey demonstrate the artist’s complete mastery over the medium as well as his fine sense of the whimsical.
Seema Bawa
The Pioneer, New Delhi. August 7, 1992

Images From The City And Woodlands
Triveni Gallery, New Delhi
Animesh Roy’s main focus is on landscapes far away from the city where individuals get lost. His pen-and-ink drawings of miniature size and his paintings in the aqueous mediums like the transparent watercolour and acrylic are now on view at the small Triveni Gallery.
Of all his exhibits, the postcard size drawings with a micro-tipped pen are perhaps the best. In fact, they stand apart from his other works for their simple but sure-handed linearity and a fine sense of design. For instance, in the drawings of small mountain villages, the narrow, meandering rustic lanes between the tin-shaded cottages show a quiet milieu of intimate domesticity, all seen from a height. The diminutive human forms makes the white of the lanes alive, particularly when deep, hard-lined shades of the roof-tops frame them from different sides. In these drawings Animesh avoids detailed suggestion of the grandeur of the mountains. It is the restrained human measure that makes his mountain scenes attractive.
In the other paintings in mixed media, Animesh seems to be going through a restless phase of transition. His earlier proficiency in painting landscapes in transparent watercolour, detailing sharp breaks in shaded and lighted areas are gradually moving towards an abstracted expression of forms and colours in the landscapes. In a predominantly green landscape, the young artist uses breezy brushwork charged with acrylic paint, and the whole scene is given a stormy diagonal movement. Pleasing no doubt, but in other paintings on high-grained hand-made paper he lapses into an amorphous mix of transparent paint-smudges on the wet paper surface, depending more on the happy accidents that usually take place when the brush is heavy with watery paint and the paper is already wet.
Santo Datta
The Hindu, Friday, New Delhi. July 15, 1994

Animesh Roy’s present crop of work at Triveni Gallery makes a departure from what administered the driving force into his art machine in the execution of landscapes previously: a sense of freshness, gleeful discovery, sudden revelation. That was work governed by fresh responses to a hill scene as he moved through it. You don’t find that cluster of flowers thrown by nature’s own hands under a rock; or that green pleasance, the overhanging rock wearing a grassy knoll as though it was its cap and the bend that indicated the interminable character of the land. The present work also seems to be the gift of a journey, particularly the linear drawings depicting architectural rhythms of the dwellings of hill folk in Himachal Pradesh. The notable thing is that without bringing in the human folk the young artist manages to suggest the typical ambience of life rhythms that inhabit these structures, reflecting both its openness and warmth and closeness. The impressive landscapes are those where the young artist captures the land, sky and atmosphere in states of unison. As a compositional necessity the terrain is always given a slanting incline with the densities of colour below serving as anchors to the airy handling and mixing of colours above, soulfully suggestive of the scene without declaring the intent. It is in the landscape in which he opens out the receding dimension that the young artist’s control on line (mark the natural rhythm of trees) and eye for the environment (the gentle yellow on grey), which looks on land from yet another angle, became noticeable. Where the sky is not attempted, atmosphere is achieved, but the parting of the land and sky would require the middle area to be infused with life to invest whole space with the compactness of a vision.
K.L. Kaul
The Statesman, Tuesday, New Delhi. July 19, 1994

Animesh Roy is best in his mixed media with brownish monumental subjects. His watercolours are pleasant. Roy’s acrylics are dexterous but less animated.
Keshav Malik
The Times of India, New Delhi. October 11, 1994

Recreating the Ambience
Animesh Roy’s display of drawings and paintings demonstrate his evolution as an artist within the basic genre of realistic landscape paintings. The artist is open to experiment, both in terms of themes as well as colour.
His earlier work was dominated by dark overtones, a product of his depiction of thick foliage and dense undergrowth. His recent works are concerned with light, its qualities and effect on the canvas. There is a fluidity in his works, missing before.
The watercolours and acrylic landscapes range from the predictable to the innovative. Among the former are the kind with a hut on a mountainside among trees reflected into a lake. The delicate use of grey, pink and mauve for the sky and a bent figure competing against nature, however, save the painting from being banal and completely run-of-the-mill.
Far better are the studies of bamboo forests. The brown, swaying tree trunks, patches of green foliage overladen with sienna, rust and umber lend it

Animesh Roy
Bachelor of Fine Arts
Delhi College of Art 1986-90

Solo Shows
2008
Romantic Days In Poland
Paintings (Oil on Canvas)
Online Solo Show
Indian Art Collectors
virtualexhibition.php.
2006
A Traveller’s Palette
Drawings and Paintings (Oils, Acrylic and Pen & Ink)
Open Palm Court Gallery
The Habitat Centre, New Delhi
1996
Drawings and Paintings
(Water Colour, Acrylic, Mix Media and Pen & Ink)
Sophia Duchesne Art Gallery, Bombay
1995
“Travels With A Donkey”
Drawings of Ladakh
(Pen and Ink Drawaings)
Mirage: Gallery of Arts, New Delhi
1994
Paintings & Drawings
(Water Colour, Acrylic, Mix Media and Pen & Ink)
Triveni Gallery, New Delhi
1992
‘On The Road’ Paintings (Acrylic)
M.E.C. Art Gallery, New Delhi
Paintings (Water Colour)
Masterpiece Art Gallery, New Delhi

TWO-ARTISTS SHOW
1995
Paintings & Drawings
(Water Colour, Acrylic, Mix Media and Pen & Ink)
Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta

GROUP SHOWS
2008
THE ART PEOPLE SHOW
Travanecore Art Gallery, New Delhi
1994
Paintings (Water Colour and Acrylic)
AIFACS, New Delhi
1992
Paintings (Water Colour)
Gallery Ganesha, New Delhi
Paintings (Acrylic)
M.E.C. Art Gallery, New Delhi
1991
Paintings (Water Colour)
selected by M. F. Hussain
Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

Oils Vs Acrylics and The Way I Paint....
2008-05-08
Just oil paints straight from the tubes! No turpentine or linseed... yes I paint spontaneously.. Without much of drawing.. frame work.. and it has to come good in one go as I don't much go back to my work after one sitting...never liked working in layers.. one layer first then put to dry and then the next...oh god I can'nt do that... I can'nt even make myself to touch up my old works!! Anyway many moons ago I was told by one of those of self appointed know-all art professors/teachers that one can'nt do oils with my kind of patient!! And that I should do acrylics.. Well we all are impressionable.. I went on to work in acrylics.. but was never happy as the colours are never bright enough for my Indian eye or never subtle...then one day in frustration I started working in oils and am so happy with the results.. Yes it's tough unlike in acrylics but the results are mind-blowing. I use brush, knives, spatula and some time my fingers..

Where are the paintings of yesteryears?
2007-09-01
Painting. The old-world meaning was a canvas or paper and paint. But now it has become a dirty word.. something to look down upon... "you actually paint?" is what I hear from all high and sundry... yes I paint using canvas and oils... I still need to go out in the woods, mountains to paint...or use a model or an apple.. no I don't use digital technology.... i don't paint abstract based on some super human intellectual high brow view of the world... I ask am I in a wrong place wrong time?
When did I last see a contemporary work of art that evoked an emotion in my heart? I don't remember.
In my works I am trying to evoke that emotion that we all get when we see real art....

my works..

if i have to write about my painting style, technique i will but if i need to explain my work..then i have failed... i feel works of art should not be explained or it will be a mere illustrations..when we go to museum just look around and you will see more people reading up the caption details than watching the painting!! our mind, brain has been tutored at homes, in schools and colleges to read... all the time. Watching, observing in meditative mode is not taught in our homes and schools...

Art is the best way to teach this skill...but most art institutions have missed the point...

Look, observe, watch.... don't look for written details...that will come later...yes i am open to reading and enjoying how the art evolved, what inspired the art, what technique...but when i go to a show or museum first is to take in the art with my eyes and heart...