Charcoal is one of the first tools humans used to make artwork, and appears in cave paintings dating back 28,000 years. Charcoal has remained a popular medium for drawing since the Renaissance. At that time, it was used for preparatory purposes: to develop initial ideas, preliminary outlines, areas of shadow, or for squaring grids used to transfer a design to another surface. Artists used charcoal to make highly finished drawings. Such works often feature textural effects, scraping, the mixing of water or other liquids with charcoal powder, stumping, and various reductive techniques such as erasing.
The medium is prized for its ability to produce an interplay between light and shadow known as chiaroscuro. By the end of the eighteenth century, the introduction of fabricated charcoal (powdered and recompressed to different degrees of hardness) provided the artist with an even greater expanded range of dark grays and blacks. Artists have refined the medium from burnt wood to finely ground charcoal bound with wax or gum into sticks, crayons, and pencils.
Charcoal drawings can be loose or they can be rendered to a high degree of realism. Artist, Manas Naskar used the latter technique in his recent series of works. He says, being from a village I am accustomed to the lush vegetation, varied foliage, and plenty of open spaces devoid of urban settlements. Trees, bushes, and distant horizons had always been sustenance to the eye and mind. My surroundings are still thriving with greenery and having been born and brought up in this lush nature, all these are deeply embedded into my subconscious. It is very obvious to me to respond to it.
My recent works reflect the relation I have with my natural habitat and landscape is a very pertinent subject to my expression. As an artist, I am trying to revisit this genre of painting. But not merely as an exquisite study of nature but more in accordance with the Ideology of romantics, where both the calmness and the wrath of nature are considered beautiful.
Sometimes I try to capture those fleeting moments where a slight shift of the sun creates a magical aura. The rustling of leaves, the gentle shadow in the swamp, the oscillating grass fields, a lone tree, flamboyant movement of light upon the dense vegetation captivate my eyes and mind. The drama I see in nature is unmatched in terms of beauty and my swift charcoal strokes always crave to capture it.
My landscapes represent nothing but the love I have for my surrounding nature. And by no means it is superficial. It has become a very part of my breathing. It forms the base of my visual library. My conscious and subconscious collection of images has always been leading me in this direction.