Page: 67 ( 82 illustrations)
Dimension: 12x 8 ½ in.
Hard Bound
Publisher: Emami Art
ISBN: 978-81-952617-8-9
This exhibition book brings together some forty rarely shown works on paper from across the career of a legendary teacher and artist, NS Bendre, revealing his intimate bonding with the world. From the beginning of his long and astonishingly prolific career, Bendre explored the earth, travelling widely and producing a large body of drawings, sketches, and watercolours of the sites, landscapes and people that make up a significant part of his oeuvre.
This catalogue, with two exuberant essays by Gulammohammed Sheikh and Arkaprava Bose, portrays Bendre's sketches of rural scenes and village women, for which he is better known. These offer a glimpse of his early travel drawings and watercolours, which are of great art historical significance. The rare photographs of the artist by Jyoti Bhatt has helped the book come to life.
For Bendre, drawing, often associated with travelling, is always a private, intimate practice, a ritualistic pleasure he enjoyed. Bendre felt a corporeal bonding with the world, as he wrote: ‘I belong to this earth. I walk on this earth. I eat on this earth, and I don't think of anything but this earth. Things here are like a library to me.’
‘The Emami show helps resurrect Narayan Shridhar Bendre’s reputation not just as an artist but also as a visionary pedagogue’- Open magazine