Lot Essay
N.S. Bendre was interested in the depiction of joy and the charms of rural India. He began his career as an artist in the 1930s painting landscapes which remained an important part of his oeuvre. From the 1970s, Bendre began experimenting with his own version of Pointillism, where the image is created with the use of pixel-like dots and small horizontal brushstrokes, and emphasis is placed on recording the artist's overall impression and the emotions of a scene. The flat expanses of vivid greens and blue to depict the landscape and the pond , Bendre makes the tree a focal point of this painting and renders its leaves in tiny, distinct spots of blue and green, typical of his neo-Pointilist style. Bendre avoided perspective in his works with little attempt to create receding planes between the foreground and the background. Rather, the effect of depth is conveyed through a gradual elimination of detail. "[...] for me, the creative process begins with the blank canvas, by the dabbing of paint on it, the aim being to catch the overall impact of the total image conceived." (R. Chatterji, Bendre: The Painter and the Person, Singapore, 1990, p. 63)