Chandana Hore’s current crop of pen-and-ink, pastel and watercolour drawings was displayed in a recent online exhibition organised by Debovasha titled The Solitary Reaper. The line drawings were mostly portraits of wide-eyed women in verdant settings with occasional touches of the lightest of pastel shades. In one work, the face of the woman is replaced by that of a presumably young boy. The boy is in tears. Another boy seems to be in deep sleep. Or is he dead? In the most delicate of these drawings, chirping fledglings nestled on the body of the woman, who could well be Mother Nature, with plants sprouting from her person.

The hatching is quite dense in some of these works, perhaps meant to add a touch of mystery to these commonplace faces. Black ink is used mostly, but, at times, blue ink is used as well. Flowers bloom in the near darkness of the backdrop. This is quite unlike her impasto paintings with their thick crust of pigment.

Cacti appear in some drawings and, in another, a woman wears traces of the terrified expression that characterises the drawings of Reba Hore, Chandana’s mother. These probably suggest an engagement with issues like death and violence. The feeling is only fleeting, though, for these faces are empty and vacuous with nary an expression to cloud their smooth brows.

The watercolour drawings with their broad and bold brushstrokes are somewhat more interesting. Here, too, nature and perhaps death are the themes. The wide swathes of red are vibrant and the sapling is indicative of germination. The faces and the leaves of the drawings recur in colour in these paintings. The bare feet sticking out in some paintings along with the text seem to be harbingers of death. This, however, is a wild guess. The two compositions with a cactus and some greenery and the other with waves of red are somewhat better conceived. But the presence of colour does not redeem these rather flat and unimaginative works.