A SERVANT OF THE LINE

The Compulsive Act: Drawings by Jogen Chowdhury Gallery Art Exposure, Kolkata (Till December 17)

- Ruchir Joshi

Jogen Chowdhury is an artist whose lifelong work has always maintained the line as its foundation

Most visual artists, especially painters, begin with the line. Sculptors can have a different route to arrive at their art, starting perhaps by tinkering first with malleable materials in childhood. But for painters, it usually begins with the first doodles on the page of a notebook or some other flat surface like a wall. The kid-scrawls trip over into legible lines, the lines take on a life of their own, demanding that the hand produce more and more of them, that the sheer sensual pleasure of mark-making can be had repeatedly, that the satisfaction a ‘finished’ set of marks delivers becomes a regular reward around which, sometimes, a whole life can be built.