Baldev Raj Panesar at work. Picture by Aranya Sen

Some artists go through a phase of mellow fruitfulness in the autumn of their lives. Baldev Raj Panesar, who turns 80 in August, is one of the lucky few. He has lived in his cubbyhole of a room at the YMCA in Wellington since 1972, and he still paints and sketches on a daily basis as part of his self-imposed regimen. But it is only now that he is going through a creative phase when he has been able to express himself just the way he chooses.

“New ideas are coming into my head with age. I am getting very good results,” says the artist, who retired in 1987 as deputy director of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Baranagar. He came to study at ISI in 1949, when it still operated from Presidency college, and decided to stay on. “Had I not come to Calcutta I would not have been encouraged,” he says, admitting that values have changed over the years.

On canvases with usually white backgrounds, Panesarji, as he is known to his friends and admirers, has conjured up with bold strokes of the spatula the figure of a woman amidst a sea of humanity and nature, but without any of the sententiousness that usually accompanies such a “theme”.

Strong painterly qualities are also seen in his landscapes with their lashings of paint, and works that hover between the figurative and abstract with their calligraphic strokes.

The statistician in Panesar comes out in his painting of the human being drowning under the poverty line, only a pair of hands and their larger reflection rising above the quagmire of deprivation. In another work, a child emerges from its home, a huge sewerage pipe. He depicts the urbanscape with looming skyscrapers without a hint of sentimentality.

Panesar, a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists, makes it clear he is not an “untrained” artist, for he was lucky enough to be trained by Dilip Dasgupta, whose studio was in Metropolitan Building, and cinematographer Subrata Mitra used to share his thoughts on composition with him.

Panesar was born to a family of farmers in Hosiarpur, Punjab. “My father, a businessman, was like my friend. He trained me to make eye estimates,” says the artist who is known to have gifted land in Madhyamgram to an old age home, and cheques that he received by selling his paintings to an institute of mathematics, statistics and computer, to ISI, his alma mater, and to YMCA to repair the basketball ground. This basketball ground is his atelier every afternoon till the players start practising.

To some destitute children of the Taltala market area, Panesarji is the man who introduced them to the magic of colour and form by encouraging them to paint.

Pygmalion-like, he had famously transformed the daughter of a vegetable seller from South 24 Parganas into Shakila, whose much-sought-after collages are exhibited the world over.

He says with a touch of pride: “I can spot a talent when I see one. The wife of a sweeper at YMCA is doing very good collage. Ranjan Sarkar, who is a help here, is also a talented collage artist. Encouragement is needed.” One is not surprised when Panesarji declares: “My greatest ambition is to show my paintings to the common man.”