Painter of the People: Sudhir Patwardhan

By- Parina Jain

Sudhir Patwardhan’s art for the last five decades has Mumbai and its people in
their fascinating lives.
Born in Pune, Maharashtra in 1949, he graduated from the armed forces medical college in 1972. He
quit his job as a radiologist in 2005 to become a full-time artist. His first exhibition of paintings was
in Delhi at the famous theatre personality E.Alkazi`s art gallery Art Heritage in 1979. This
exhibition was then held in Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. Since then, he has held more than 15
solo exhibitions in all major galleries.

For the last five decades Patwardhan worked tirelessly towards capturing Mumbai’s everyday
urban scenes onto his canvas. He presents the City of Dreams in all its contradictions, as an
unbiased observer, a mere spectator to the lives and stories of the millions of people who walk
the streets of Mumbai each day. He depicts the gentle and calm world fading away while on the
other hand, he brings to life Mumbai’s urban scenery.

A painter of people, Patwardhan is a firm believer in the fact that it is “people who give meaning
to places, spaces and cities.” ‘Another day in the Old City’ (2017), narrates the transition of and
old neighbourhood. You can see faces peeking out of their windows, people like these are the
tools of development, but these people are also what you might call trapped in time. Living in the
old city still, with looming skyscrapers behind them, still a part of what life once was for the
artist.

Another day in the Old City

One of his most famous artworks, ‘Mumbai Proverbs’ marks a culmination of Sudhir
Patwardhan’s forty-year-old relationship with Mumbai. This painting makes you see the evolution
of the city as well as the evolution of the artist. This seven-panel acrylic on canvas combines all
Patwardhan’s typical style of viewing the city through a street level view of a participant, a
panoramic view of an observer and a guarded view of a person looking out of a window. It starts
with the colonial city on the left and moves gradually to the present, encompassing and
projecting a history of change through time.
 Mumbai Proverbs

His work also reflects the threat of development taking over history. Like, in Lower Parel (2001),
viewers can easily recognise the symbolic evolution of central Mumbai, with corporate towers
threatening to take over the mills.

Lower Parel

Recently, he has been doing a lot more paintings depicting the interior life of an artist. An
amazing example of this is ‘Erase’ (2017). On the face of it, it seems like an artist wiping
something off his canvas. Looking deeper, it is a reflection on the process of art creation.
Patwardhan says, “It is about what is possible to communicate and what is not. The artist starts
by saying something, then he wipes and starts anew.”

Erase
To conclude, certain images seem to have brief and nearly flat silhouette, whereas in some
others the painter delights in bringing out the volumes of bodies, clothes and hair materialising
through the light and shadow sliding over their surface. His vast acrylic canvases are a faithful
depiction of the specific area, an ordinary and quite typical part of Mumbai with its coexistence
of decent residential buildings and poor ones, of industry and nature. These, however, exude a
strangely bewitching atmosphere -both serene and disturbing, literal and poetic. Patwardhan
conjures an aura of things beyond the concrete and the singular.