Untitled (Landscape)

Richard Bartholomew, writing for the journal Thought in 1959, described Raza's vision as 'prismatic'. He explained, "Colour is his joy and his schema. He is interested in the life of colour and in the life he can depict through colour. There is no symbolism other than the symbolism and the symbolic gestures of colour. The landscape is only a skeletal base, the structure of which we forget when we follow the gesture. The joints, the action of individual images, are not his primary concern. What is important to him is the leverage, the pulsating thrust of colour, its areas of dryness and of moisture, its even tranquility, its swirls of tension and its gathering of energy into knots of sudden illumination."

"Colour is the legend to each of these landscapes, because in each painting the flesh and form of colour are organic to the skeletal structure, we see the anatomy but not the division of the drawing. Therefore, there is no seductive line to give you the sense of the thing. Trees, houses, roads, streams, the undulation of the land, the falling shadows, the perpendicularity, the levelness, the foreground and the horizon all shift and throb with the life of colour, and the scene is not static. There is hardly a patch of colour that is passive." (R. Bartholomew, 'Paintings by S.H. Raza', Thought, 16 May 1959, reproduced in The Art Critic, New Delhi, 2012, p. 339)