Answer: Roy signing on his paintings
What differentiated Jamini Roy's art from that of village artists was that he signed on his paintings.
If rural community was important for Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinker Baij, Jamini Roy, too, made his art relevant to this context. Jamini Roy rejected his own training received at the Government School of Art, Calcutta. Being a student of Abanindranath Tagore, he realised the futility of pursuing academic art. He noticed that the rural, folk art in Bengal had much in common with how modern European masters like Picasso and Paul Klee painted. After all, Picasso had arrived at Cubism by learning from the use of bold forms found in African masks. Roy, too, used simple and pure colours. Like village artists, he also made his own colours from vegetables and minerals. His art lent itself to easy reproduction by other members in his family, quite like the artisanal practice followed in villages. However, what differentiated his art from that of village artists was that Roy signed on his paintings. His style is seen as uniquely personal, distinct from both the academic naturalism of art schools and from Raja Ravi Varma’s Indianised naturalism, as well as, from the delicate style practised by some of the Bengal School artists. |
