“Have you seen the golden glass?/ Glowing like gold?/ Once you have beheld it/ the rest turns black...”
It would not be far-fetched to say that these lines from the Bengali short poems penned by Reba Hore (1926-2008) while she was convalescing for almost a year in Santiniketan after fracturing her leg for the third time in 2004 eloquently describe the molten colours of the spate of paintings and drawings and poems that she tirelessly brought into being in that period. This act of creation — both visual and verbal — worked as an anodyne as she felt excruciating pain. This prodigious output was displayed in the exhibition, Reba Hore: The Broken Foot Journal and Other Stories, mounted jointly by the Seagull Foundation for the Arts and Experimenter. She jotted down the short poems in a diary which she entitled The Broken Foot Journal. Taking a dig at her miserable condition, she borrowed a popular song composed by Rabindranath Tagore and used as her strapline the words: “On a bloodied fragment of my broken foot...”
Reba Hore’s verse from this period is interspersed with word pictures that correspond to the imagery and the play of light and darkness and silhouette-like forms in her work in the visual medium. “The room is shadowy in the gloaming/ The faces are all dark/ I feel anxious, I feel anxious/ Come forward and speak!!” While speaking about the rain she wrote: “Green golden ashen/ It’s all quite curious.” And then again: “The orange of the shirt/ merges with the body/ Sitting in the verandah on an evening like this/ Mother used to observe the sky.” And finally: “Some criss-crossed sunshine,/ the sky a blue curtain.”
Pain was the stimulus of her work and she worked like one possessed. Dark beings crowded her paintings and drawings, and although there is nothing ominous about these works unlike some of her earlier drawings, the frenetic action of her hands as she built up those shadowy forms is unmistakable. The lines are tremulous with excitement and one can imagine Reba Hore dabbing the sheets of paper with watercolour, frenziedly setting the surface alight with fiery shades of orange, chrome, red and blue pastels and then eliminating the same with darker shades of brown and black as she sculpted those forms as if she were using a plastic medium.
When she used oils, she slathered the surface with thick layers of paint and although in these, too, the human frame is unmistakable — huddled together, or in communion like the two lone figures, in all probability Reba Hore with her daughter, Chandana, the artist — the impasto on canvas approaches abstraction as the shapes are somewhat nebulous. The feverish energy with which she attacked the canvas is quite obvious from her animated brush strokes. Reba Hore’s injury had bled profusely, releasing, as it were, a flow of colour and pain. During her convalescence, the artist may have been confined to her room which she shared with her husband, the artist, Somnath Hore, and daughter, Chandana, but her immobility seemed to be inversely proportional to the power released by her intense creative activity.
Her terracotta sculptures — moulded lovingly with her fingers — are pools of tranquillity. She drew her inspiration from life around her. These seem to have evolved on their own from Santiniketan’s laterite soil.