Shyamal Dutta Ray was born in Ranchi in 1934. During the Second World War his family left Calcutta for Mymensingh, and the years he spent there left a lasting impression on him, one that shaped his development as an artist. When the disruption of the war had subsided, the family returned to Calcutta in 1942, when Shyamal was eight years old. Calcutta was then politically unsettled, in the midst of the freedom struggle.
The rain-filled ponds and rivers of his early years in East Bengal, and his closeness to that landscape, may have shaped his later attraction to watercolour. Ray came to hold an especially prominent position in contemporary Indian art for his part in establishing watercolour as a serious medium. He had begun painting as a young boy. He matriculated in 1949, decided that painting was the only life open to him, and joined the Government College of Art and Crafts, Calcutta. On his first day there he became friends with Nikhil Biswas (1930-1966), one of the college's strongest students. Ray was shaped, at the college and long after, by two teachers, Gopal Ghose and Anil Bhattacharya; he traced his early understanding of watercolour to Gopal Ghose. He also held the artists of Santiniketan in high regard, visiting often to study the work of Nandalal Bose, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij, and grew increasingly conscious of the indigenous roots of art, coming to believe that art should stay rooted in its own soil and maintain a continuity of tradition. He graduated from the art college in 1955.
Like many painters of his generation, Shyamal Dutta Ray moved between frustrated ambitions and hopeful expectations. After leaving the art college, he faced the struggle common to his generation: a determination to become an artist set against the need to earn a living. He gave painting lessons and worked on illustrations and cover designs for books. The British watercolourist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) had taken the medium of watercolour to a great height, and he played an indirect but significant part in shaping Ray's own technique and handling of the medium. Ray studied how Turner used light and shadow to create a sense of depth. His own style had not yet taken its settled form, but by this time he had attained proficiency in both oil and watercolour. In recognition of this he received the Gold Medal at the annual exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1958, a first recognition that restored his self-confidence to an extent. The realism of his surroundings, from his boyhood years to the end of the 1950s, shaped his outlook.
Around the beginning of the 1960s Ray experimented with the textures of graphic art and began to focus on the deplorable human situation around him. In his drawings of the human figure from this period, a shrivelled, bony structure appears, suggested by the geometrical angularity of line that came to dominate his work. The distant memory of death and poverty in wartime Calcutta unconsciously found its way into his work, and his own distinctive style grew out of it.
Nihar Ranjan Ray, inaugurating one of Ray's exhibitions in the 1970s, remarked that a new symbol had come into painting. Through the symbol of the broken bowl and his individual manner of presentation, Ray expressed a distinctive form and world view in that decade. Alongside it came a broken throne, dilapidated palaces and buildings, crows, thirsty birds, dried-up tanks, and emaciated, almost skeletal dogs. The struggle between success and failure, hope and despair, ran through the period, and the shift from the decorativeness of the 1960s to a direct rendering of the human situation in the 1970s is evident in the work.
The interplay between realism and dream continued through his paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, which moved between the extremes of destruction and affirmation. Ray travelled abroad for the first time in 1997, through several European countries including England and France, where he visited art museums and exhibitions. He was especially struck by a retrospective of Turner's work; standing before many original works by an artist who had drawn him since his formative years was, for him, an unusually valuable experience. Turner's paintings opened his eyes and turned him toward a direction that stayed with him for the rest of his career. Ray returned from Europe with renewed inspiration.
Shyamal Dutta Ray died in 2005. Over his career he passed through many phases of experiment as an artist, developing a technique in watercolour, a medium regarded until then as minor, into one adequate to express deeper feeling and sensibility. He showed that watercolour could serve not only for landscapes and preparatory sketches, but also, used properly, for work of real seriousness and depth. He experimented with the medium extensively to see how it could carry the weight of social realism. Among the artists who gained recognition in West Bengal during the 1960s, Ray was the one who practised watercolour continuously enough to raise it to the status of a serious medium. His importance lay in restoring watercolour to the significant position it had held in Indian art in the 1960s.
Vinayak Pasricha.