V.R. PATEL

Vinod Ray Patel is an artist who lives up to his name; he seemed to derive a lot of amusement from whatever he does. And he had the talent and technical facility to cover a large ground. He had a delightful sense of design. He had a sumptuous appetite for colour. He has a many-sided graphic ability that can give form to various shades of experience, ranging from the full-bloodedly sensual to the witty and the sarcastic.

One of the most distinguished printmakers of the country, for Vinod Ray Patel art was a means of self-expression, even self-indulgence. He did not subscribe to the view that ordinary people should either consider art important or take it seriously. No wonder while moving from Baroda to Delhi, he made a bonfire of his own work. Born in Vadodra in 1933, VR, as everyone knew Patel, was not academically inclined. His elder brother was a commercial designer.

After failing his matriculation four times, he joined Alembic Industries as a designer. In 1955, he enrolled as a student at the Baroda Faculty of fine Arts and studied under N. S. Bendre. In 1962, he became a teacher of painting at the same faculty and continued there until 1994. In 1996 he moved to Delhi. In an interview he had said, "I am not a born artist. I am a trained artist." I love black and white. In colour I can’t even think. I am interested in forms. My paintings don’t tell a story." He stopped doing oils because he did not have the patience to wait for hours for it to dry.

An impatient experimentalist, he dabbled into a variety of media—oil on canvas, acrylic on glass, dry pastels, lithography, silkscreen, etching, woodcut, linocut, etc. The body of VR’s work is extremely large. One of the most memorable group of works is a series of silkscreen prints that he did — black-on-black and black-on-white in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The lines are sharp and powerful without sentimentality, the images uncluttered.