teacher in college, undertaken every day in nearby market places and railway stations began in the early morning and resumed yet again in the afternoon after college hours and continued till late at night. It allowed him to observe life around him at different times of the day and that in turn offered enough variety of activities he loved to observe and sketch. Such repeated observations of similar activities in frequently visited surroundings had a beneficial effect too. The images got deeply etched in his memory and allowed him to recall the same at will in his later years. He used such imagery time and again in developing pictorial compositions. Moreover his singular attention in those days for sketching also offered him countless opportunities to study the human body in motion, and in situations of varying emotion. To this he added his newly acquired technique of angular divisionism that he learned from Vijaymohan. It eventually led his art to the threshold of cubism that had a similar emphasis on building human anatomy with geometrically angular shapes. We shall look at his debt to cubism in some detail later. But it may now be said that this close similarity with cubism remained only skin-deep in his art, it appears in retrospect, that he seldom felt the need of a closer understanding of what cubism really stood for. For him it was only a stylistic tool that helped cement his own spiritual content. His interest in human anatomy increased in tandem with his drawing skills that now had a better and more academic approach. The intensity of his involvement with the task at hand may be seen by the fact that, in order to study the shape of the human skull, he had once had his own head shaved clean so that he could draw its shape from various angles, and thus, study the subject even without the needed availability of live models. He had installed a tall mirror and sketched his own reflection at will. He would continue with drawing and painting from live models in his class-studies at the art college during the day while, at night, he would light up a candle to study his clean-shaved head now appearing different, by being illuminated with only the candle-light, to study the effect of ‘chiaroscuro’ (Fig. 68). He loved this interplay of light against dark as if it was a battle between opposing forces of unknown magnitude, something that has always inspired many artists in the past like Rembrandt whom he always admired. Neeraj found ample opportunity of sketching his subjects in similar conditions of semi darkness when returning home every night
Fig. 62. Drawing, pen and ink on paper, 9” x 4”, 1985 75