Bikash Bhattacharya and his Durgas

I am not a connoisseur, critic or even a student of art. Terms, jargon and sometimes, even nuances, elude me. But I'd like to believe nonetheless, that I am, as much as anyone else, endowed with an innate aesthetic sensibility that does not necessarily require formal training. And the paintings of Bikash Bhattacharya appeal to me precisely for this power they have, to touch that raw, untrained chord. His portrayal of women, in particular-with which, I was initiated into Bikash's world of magic-realism-left me in awe and in love with the man for life! One has only to see his Durga-series to know what I mean. The artist's brush seemed to glide over the canvas as gently as a lover's caress; the desire to know and discover the body of the woman, as ardent and real as that of a flesh-and-blood lover, seeped through with every careful stroke. Painting after painting. Durga after Durga.
In many ways, he paved the way for the typification of the 'ideal Bengali' woman; goddess-like; large, kohl-smudged eyes, vermilion smeared across the forehead; long flowing wavy hair; cotton sari draping a dusky, supple, curvy body, and sleeveless blouse revealing shapely womanly arms. Flaming sensuality.
Even then however, what absolutely enthralled me was the fact that the images never really conformed to stereotypes of feminine beauty, even in semi-nude depictions. No effort was made to cover a flaw up or mask a blemish. It made me wonder about the artist's own love and appreciation for the female body, irrespective of its age or colour or proportion. It COULD NOT have been a false reflection! Secretly, I've always wondered how it might have been to be his muse, wondered how his brush might have lingered on the canvas, in portraying me as his Durga. This man was a lover first, a painter then. Someone who saw beauty and divinity in the most ordinary, even traipsing on the ugly, in its conventional understanding. To me, he emerged as the worshipper of the feminine form, resplendent even in its most repulsive repugnant manifestations. In so doing, Bikash seemed to scoff at traditional aesthetic morality, mock archetypes of the 'beautiful' and challenge popular notions of the 'desirable' female body. I am sure there have been painters before him who had deified the feminine form, even in all its gory and macabre avatars, but there was something about Bikash's paintings that seemed to supercede them all, in terms of pure visual experience. I am in any case, someone who is easily enraptured by the photographic likeness of a painting, so that Bikash's paintings reached out to me in a manner that is nothing short of esoteric. The love and longing of each careful brush-stroke showed itself on the body of the particular Durga-whether she be the urban homemaker, or the domestic help, the blind pregnant woman or the woman with a paunch, way past her prime-both in body and spirit. All desirable. All beautiful. All Durgas. All women.