|
As wife of that great sculptor and pioneer of the contemporary Indian art movement, the late Somenath Hore, Reba Hore has up till now, always remained in the shadow of her renowned husband. A uniquely sensitive creative artist in her own right, her wonderful talent – though it has always been implicitly acknowledged – is only recently being widely extolled.
Reba Hore’s works describe with sensitive introspection, her emotional responses to the stimuli of her day-to-day life experiences. These stimuli might be as mundane as the animals in her courtyard, or the pastoral nuances, the everyday avocations of men and women, and the folk vitality of the Santiniketan where she has spent her entire life; or they might be spirit-rending emotional evocations of momentous human tragedies like the Bengal Famine, which was contemporary to her times.
What emerges from her depictions is her deeply introspective comprehension of the universal human drama, which, played out in the backyard of every person’s life, in ways both momentous and seemingly trivial – reminds us repeatedly that ‘no man is an island’. Reba Hore is an artist of the people, whose work is distinguished by its universality, its prodding of the spirit’s ‘tender spot’.
She is also a creator par excellence, and a master of the strong descriptive line. The lines and colours in her small-format works in dry pastels and mixed media seem almost to be scrawled in, hastily put together. Yet with a few apparently rough, spontaneous strokes, she evokes an entire emotional universe. The bonding of ‘friends’, the ‘comfort’ of a simple hug offered by a young women to a demoralized man, the inner solitude of an old man, the conviviality of villagers gathered around a fire on a winter’s evening, the hollow-faced desolation of starving people, come vividly alive, in the expressiveness of her simply nuanced lines and colours.
|
