Jogen Chowdhury’s drawings are truly revealing in the sense that they embody a compelling truth an artist aspires for. The truth in this context is multi-layered. It is about an artist’s unremitting visual encounter with the world around and it is also about bringing to the paper what is already in the mind’s eye. A keen observer of life with all its minutiae, Jogen Chowdhury strikes an obsessive relationship with the visual reality in these drawings.
Small, ordinary and even banal visuals of everyday life and natural surrounding find their ways effortlessly to his six decades long practice of intimate drawings, to his quick scribblings and spontaneous imaginations. This passionate engagement manifests itself in numerous drawings Jogen Chowdhury did since the beginning of his journey as an artist. Till date he continues to draw ceaselessly and compulsively at any time and at any place. Random yet intimate, these drawings, executed on any piece of paper he could lay his hand on, eventually grew in number following him at every step. The drawn images collect themselves together as palimpsests inscribed with multitude of experienced moments thus making the mental process and the final images fairly complex, albeit discreetly. In some sense this apparent simplicity of many of these drawings often camouflages the highly complex coordination between hand, skill, mind, vision and memory. The more we look at them we begin to realize that these drawings tend to claim an independent life of their own, assuming an iconic image-presence, irrespective of what they represent.
Jogen Chowdhury’s drawings are characterized by distinctive lines which function not only to shape the visual forms from life but they also draw out what is supposedly out of sight or buried deep inside the psyche. Lines with various insinuations and width, sharp or soft, squiggly or aggressive, keep moving around the reality seen and felt and burrowed deep into the psychic realm of human existence. Stylistically speaking, the drawings range from a tender naturalism and expressionism at one end to a highly evolved personal idiom imbued with instinctual drive at the other end. They often overlap to form a characteristic style and tendency of their own eschewing the trap of a singular style or technique and allowing the creative impulse to innovate a variety of modes to express and convey his stream of thoughts.
The restive edgy quality of lines in most of his drawings are partly instinctual as much as they are about the organicity of nature and the sensuality of life. This visual ambivalence that sustains the strength in these drawings are rooted in Jogen Chowdhury’s deep faith in the incessant flow of life despite the shadows of the dark edges of life. These drawings are testimonies of the process to keep this renewal alive with a sense of deep commitment. A glimpse at the six decades of drawings unveils how that faith is passed on from one drawing to the other, each one sharing its energy with the next. We are fortunate witnesses to a secret alchemy at work, as it were.
