Hillscape

Artist: Tapan Mitra
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 40 × 56 inches (101.6 × 142.24 cm)
Year: 2024

Tapan Mitra’s Hillscapes is a vibrant and meticulously composed landscape that draws upon the visual language of traditional Asian, particularly Himalayan, painting idioms, while simultaneously asserting a distinctly contemporary and individual sensibility. Executed in acrylic on canvas, the work embodies a fusion of expressive formalism and cultural memory, where the natural world is rendered not through mimetic realism, but through stylized rhythm, bold color contrasts, and symbolic abstraction.

Dominated by a background of deep forest green, the canvas presents a spatially layered composition where stylized mountains and rolling hills unfold across the foreground in a rich spectrum of umber, sienna, terracotta, and rust. These earthbound tones are articulated in broad, graphic forms, echoing the bold contours and simplified geometrics typical of traditional Himalayan thangka or scroll paintings. The interplay between these grounded masses and the ethereal expanses above suggests both stability and transcendence, a central duality in many Eastern landscape traditions.

Interspersed throughout the terrain are pointed, spiky tree forms, rendered in rhythmic repetition and varying hues of green, yellow, and gold. These vertical accents not only activate the landscape visually, but serve as metaphoric elements, recalling sacred groves, meditative forests, and mythic topographies rooted in indigenous lore. Their stylized rendering emphasizes the symbolic over the literal, a hallmark of Mitra’s practice.

Floating above the landscape, large light gray clouds create atmospheric modulation and visual balance. Their painterly softness contrasts with the angularity of the hills and trees, reinforcing the dynamism of the composition. The subtle use of gold and yellow accents, applied sparingly yet deliberately, infuses the work with a spiritual luminosity, evoking light as both a physical and metaphysical presence. Of particular interest are the small, stylized orange flying forms dispersed across the canvas. These could be interpreted as birds or celestial motifs, lending movement and narrative potential to the scene. Their presence, while understated, contributes to the painting’s meditative and almost mythical character.

Hillscapes transcends the descriptive to become a visual invocation, of landscape not merely as geography, but as a symbolic and emotional terrain. Through an adept combination of color, texture, and cultural referencing, Tapan Mitra offers a landscape that invites reflection, reverence, and an engagement with the sacred patterns of nature and form.