Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) was born in Kilimanoor Palace as the son of Umamba Thampuratti and Neelakandan Bhattathiripad. At the age of seven years he started drawing on the palace walls using charcoal. His uncle Raja Raja Varma noticed the talent of the child and gave preliminary lessons on painting. At the age of 14, Ayilyam Thirunal Maharaja took him to Travancore Palace and he was taught water painting by the palace painter Rama Swamy Naidu. After 3 years Theodor Jenson, a British painter taught him oil painting.
Most of his paintings are based on Hindu epic stories and characters. In 1873 he won the First Prize at the Madras Painting Exhibition. He became a world famous Indian painter after winning in 1873 Vienna Exhibition.Ravi Varma's sixteen prized paintings are on display at the famous Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery and Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore. The paintings attract the attention of every visitor because of its rich medium - oil that enhances the appearance of substances like jewels, cloth, and flesh and captures the atmospheric sensation. Over a period of time, Raja Ravi Varma developed three dimensional pictorial entities of noble nature, richly adorned prince and princess with a royal background and has also dramatically displayed various scenes of the great Hindu epics.
Biography of Vasudeo S. Gaitonde
A graduate from the famous J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1948, Gaitonde remained committed to a fairly solitary vision even within artists' groups. He joined the Progressive Artists Group as an associate, like Krishen Khanna and Tyeb Mehta, in the early 1950s.
Gaitonde was chosen for the Bombay Art Society award in 1950. In 1957 he won an award at the Asian Artists exhibition for his work `The Bird and The Egg'. During the 1950s Gaitonde worked in the famed Bhulabhai Institute where Alkazi's theatre unit and Ravi Shankar's school of music and dance were also housed.
He is widely acknowledged as India's most committed abstract artist.Conceptually, however, Gaitonde never considered himself as an abstract painter and was averse to being called one. In fact, he believed that there was no such thing as abstract painting; instead, he referred to his work as non- objective,devoid of subject matter.
