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| Murlidhar Sadashiv Joshi |
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Murlidhar Sadashiv Joshi was born at Sinnar (Nasik) in Maharashtra in 1912. A prolific painter, Joshi was a gifted water colourist who was consumed by painting. In his long career as an artist he committed himself to work on gouaches and aquarelles.
The large body of paintings that he produced had its highs and lows and included unfinished works. However, several of his large watercolours rendered on paper and gouache on textured mount board carry a stillness and kinetic energy that invests a rounded volume to the entire composition. This prana, the life force that seems to swell from within the architectural elements of Joshi's paintings reflects an important facet of Indian aesthetics, which the artist instinctively brought into his work. This power to enrich his compositions with a variety of stylistic elements from diverse global sources as well as his known enviornment lends a stamp of conviction to Joshi's work.
It is in his later aquarelles and gouaches rendered in a large format that Joshi actually found his painterly metier. To counter the structural restrictions these inner cityscapes, one of his favoured compositional themes, imposed on his imagery Joshi used the devise of infusing his work with a near existential vigour. All the piled, congested architectural elements in works such as Moti Bazaar, Bombay and Bhadrakali Mandir, Nasik, seem to be alive and engaged in a dialogue as they grow tangentially upon and out of one qnother. The broad brush strokes, the quirky indigo shadows, broad organic sweeps of ochre and beige awnings, and the quixotically projecting balconies and closed structures with spires and flat roofs are merged together with the blurring of the formal linear geometry of the architectural elements. This compels the entire lot of structures to form a unified mass that rises straight out of a flat foreground, which gradually gets peopled by persona created with a few broad loaded brushstrokes. Again these figures have their edges smudged, which helps them fuse into a single moving mass. Joshi uses smooth, wide and full brushstrokes to create volume and movement. The subtle energy that suffuses the bazaar crowd finally melts into the sheer brushstrokes that merely suggest their presence as they move inwards. Another interesting facet of Joshi's larger work is the powerful rendering of akasha,the sky-void, that seems to be full of a sweeping, playful, elemental, impassioned movement and volume that suggest cosmic forces rather than pleasant skies. The enormous white turquoise clouds in Moti Bazaar, Bombay appear to sweep the sky in a bold energy, their voluminous, dramatic presence stands quite in contrast to the architectural conglomorate of buildings and the living presence of the organically active foreground. Besides his technical virtuosity in handling watercolours and gouache it is the unexpected moody urgency of contrastive energies that enliven his compositions that make Joshi's later work masterful.
The fact is that Joshi struggled throughout his career to infuse the known format of academic realism with an enlivening and empowering imprint of a quirky presence that seemed to have a life of its own. This is best illustrated in Moti Bazaar where startling indigo and turquoise shadows plunge downwards and recede into niches complementing the dancing blue sky. Joshi refused to ignore his cultural roots while assimilating expressionist elements into his work. Instead he let his vaadas speak and move like organic creatures with magical powers in his larger gouache works. The mellow palette that Joshi preferred to use built large architectural surfaces worked with thick pigment layered with broad rhythmic brushstrokes which were broken by touches of jewel colours. Light touched his compositions with mellow intensity. It formed a translucent underlayer of radiance that lit his work from within. Inside his cityscapes and landscapes a serene, celebratory ananda, joy, presides over all things. - Joshi continued to paint well into his old age, as long as he could hold a brush in his hand.
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