Artist profile - Sunil Das

This appeared in the Deccan Herald in April 2005

Sunil Das is at Mumbai’s Jamaat Art Gallery in downtown Colaba for his exhibition entitled ‘Horses and Bulls’. The seventh floor gallery is full of light and breeze and tug boats and steamers glide by on the blue grey Arabian Sea, as the artist settles down with black coffee and a cigarette to talk art. The Gallery and its deceptively spacious Annex, once perhaps a sea view balcony, are today an appropriate setting for the paper and canvas works of impetuous animals that line its walls. You can almost see each magnificent animal draw in its breath, sometimes rearing, sometimes snorting or else gamboling. There’s mobility, power and a sinuous grace in every frame – Das’s skill lies in creating a form simultaneously abstract yet wholly representative, in definitive strokes that flow, using a palette that is minimalist and yet absolutely expressive, not only in terms of the sheer physicality of the beasts, but also in terms of its spirit – sometimes tempestuous, sometimes temperate or just plain playful! The black and white bull on a 6 by 4 feet canvas seems to almost leap at you from a background that somberly golden acrylic, there’s a flash of movement – perhaps he is charging and perhaps he is just spirited.

Sixty something, Kolkata based post modernist Sunil Das has an impressive oeuvre both in terms of the medium that he works with as well as his choice of subjects. Das uses paper, acrylic and canvas as well foil, nails or anything else that strikes him to impressive aesthetic effect. All this sells well and Das says he has sold even his student sketchbooks which figure several thousand horses. The first time he began to draw bulls, sitting at bull fights in Spain, people around him would buy the drawings then and there. Today, his soulful series on women and other work notwithstanding, horses and bulls continue to be a leitmotif of sorts for the painter, who explains why. Studying at the Government Art College in Kolkata, the young Sunil would complete his classes and spend the rest of the day walking around the streets of Calcutta, sketching everything he saw around him, and catching the very last train home. One day he was struck by the mounted police and followed the horses back to the stables, and began to sketch them. Thus began a life long affair with these magnificent beasts – “I became known as Horse Sunil – one of my horses was sent to Delhi to the President and I won the national Award as an undergraduate”, he recounts,” I suddenly became well known, the college had a special holiday, girls who had never even looked at me before now started to”. Das reminisces about his scholarship interview, where he enthusiastically walked into the office staggering under a load of all his drawings, unlike the other candidate with neat business like single file folder resumes – needless to say he won the scholarship! His stories of how the young, unsophisticated Sunil found his feet in Paris are fascinating, peopled with an unfeeling Indian Embassy (who later he delights to tell, found themselves wiping wine glasses for receptions for the now well known Indian artist!), a young African boy and a Frenchman who appeared miraculously in response to his fervent appeals to God.

Several exhibitions and awards later, Das has now opened his own Gallery at Kolkata, called Gallery Sunil where he discusses art with prospective buyers by appointment over a cup of coffee .