What is the best way of peering into the artist’s mind? More than finished and refined artworks, it is their throwaway doodles — sometimes as a small gift on the postcards of yore and, at others, as an etching while ruminating on a bigger piece and so on — that show the fascinating way in which the artistic mind works. Two recent shows at Debovasha featuring two students of Abanindranath Tagore were perfect examples of this. Jamini Roy: The delicate stroke eternal — For the poet Bishnu Dey showed small doodles and works gifted by the artist to the poet and Prosanto Roy: Little visuals on a long journey had postcards and sketches by an artist who was perhaps the true inheritor of Gaganendranath Tagore’s idiom of modernism.

The pieces by Jamini Roy, including the conceptualisation and the evolution of the cover of Bishnu Dey’s Smriti Satta Bhabishyat, bore evidence of the initial visions of many of the works that are now synonymous with the master. Take the repeated rough sketches of Madonna and Child and Mother and Child (picture, left), for instance. While the lines and the composition styles are different, even through these scribbled lines, Jamini Roy manages to convey the bond between a mother and a child, be it in an ordinary rural home or within the holy family. Since many of these were gifted by Jamini Roy to Bishnu Dey, one can only imagine that he was sending sketches of things he was working on and marvel at the artistic exchange that was taking place between the two luminaries.

Prosanto Roy’s postcards to Abanindranath Tagore, Bratindranath Tagore and Amitendranath Tagore, among others, are priceless for the rich anthropological details that can be found in them. The few paintings here are delicate watercolours, again on postcards, bearing evidence of the light Japanese washes that Prosanto Roy learnt from Abanindranath and Gaganendranath and was fascinated by. Many of the pieces are of small landscapes that artists once made a practice of etching and sending to their near and dear ones in the course of their travels. The illustration of Arabian Nights (picture, right) is marvellous, not just for its delicate colouring and fine lines but also for capturing the sense of exoticism that one associates with the tales.