Justifying Creativity
Popularly known as Om Prakash, Mr. Om Prakash Sharma was born in Haryana in 1932. His early art education was in Meerut, from where he came for higher education to the then Delhi Polytechnic, of which he later become the principal for 11 years from 1981 to 1992, and thence to Columbia University and Art Students League, New York.
It is believed that a painting justifies its own creation and being. This is perfectly true of Om Prakash’s paintings displayed on an entire floor of the Lalit Kala Galleries, by Art Pilgrim, showing through this concluding week of September.
Om Prakash is a painter of the ilk of the Late GR Santosh, SH Raza, and now the rhetoric Sohan Qadri. His works have always dazzled the most discerning viewer with their brilliant colour and impeccable compositions, with geometricity as the very core of its visual vocabulary, making many an art lover wonder why Om Prakash is not a bigger rage than he is today! It is perhaps the matter of temperament, or just a question of spreading only as much as one’s inner faculties permit; for anything else is not genuine in terms of art.
Om Prakash’s is a world contained within the geometry of Mandalas, or in another words, the meeting place of the minds, the body, the cosmic and the divine. Colour and composition play a major role in this vocabulary, being the main exponents of theory and content with their modulation and structuring. Om Prakash excels in his fields. His color choices, grading and modulation are of the highest order, ranging from the meditative to the celebrative, passionate, sensitive or sensuous with equal expertise. Organisation of features, be they line, colour planes, or design by way of special distribution, has always been Om Prakash’s special quality, Executed with the strongest discipline, his works put any given display area on strong grid, emanating energy and order. It seems difficult indeed to imagine any given area with an Om Prakash painting harboring or brooking indiscipline of any kind. One is very serious in saying that our political brass and equally our civic agency officials should be made to jointly meditate before an Om Prakash painting every morning and what better than the LKA showing the way while the show is still on within its own gallery. Kudos to Gita Singh and Art Pilgrim.
Aruna Bhowmick – The Statesman, New Delhi, Sep 28, 2007