The Practice
Now
The Practice Today
In his sixth decade as an artist, Deepak Shinde paints the question he has carried longest: coexistence — no longer only the compact between man and beast, but the oldest story life tells. The new works are chronicles: of creatures riding floods and crossing continents, of arks and sacred waters, of myth and memory sharing one frame. The animal world he has painted for two decades now stands in wider company — everything that persists alongside us, because of us, and despite us.
The means have renewed themselves once more. The monumental canvas has given way to an intimate scale; oil and acrylic to mixed media, built up in layered, textured grounds until the surface itself holds light. In them, the subjects stand anchored in the specific and luminous with the mythic — the newest language of a search that has never kept one for long.
Upcoming Exhibition
The Bombay Flora Chronicle
Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai · 13 August – 03 September 2026
1971–1979
Abstraction
Shinde began where painting itself begins: in colour and form, unencumbered by subject. For nearly a decade the canvases carried no figures — only pigment in force and flux, laid on with knife and brush, worked and reworked until the surface held the charge of the seeing that produced it. The abstraction of these years was not a borrowed manner; it was a young painter testing what colour alone could say.
By the decade's end, he had his answer — and its limit. Colour could carry feeling; it could not carry meaning of the kind he now needed to make. The first language was complete. He set it down.
In the artist's words:
“I started my career as an abstract painter — a genre I followed for nearly a decade. Abstraction, for me, then reached a cul-de-sac. I felt the need for figures, as carriers of meaning.”
1980–1992
Figuration
The figures, when they came, brought the world with them. India in the 1980s was a country in argument with itself, and the paintings turned to face it: political upheaval, the theatre of power, and above all the working lives he had watched since childhood — farmers, labourers, people at their occupations, rendered in an expressionist figuration that owed as much to his eye for gesture as to his training in the figure. The palette stayed torrid; the subjects grew human.
Trained at a school where the figure was the foundation, he drew people as naturally as breathing — but he painted them through colour, recording not likenesses but conditions.
In the artist's words:
“As a child I enjoyed watching the farmer ploughing the field under the burning sun, crows hovering behind him to pick the worms unearthed from the soil. To me it seemed the farmer was doing a drawing on Mother Earth — like a tattoo, or an engraving.”
1993–2003
Allegorical
In the early 1990s the gaze turned inward. The public subjects had been painted; the questions that remained were personal — intimacy, relationship, the ties and tensions of a life rooted in family and city. The paintings became contemplative: myth and parable entered, figures grew transparent and symbolic, and the man–woman theme emerged as a long meditation on the oldest of human bonds.
The method deepened with the content. Layer upon layer of pigment, worked with the palette knife, produced surfaces like palimpsests — pictures in which earlier states remain faintly present beneath the final one, as they do in memory. The style had changed again, because the questions had.
In the artist's words:
“One outgrows one's own ideas, thoughts and beliefs. Every creative person must destroy a form to create a new vision. I realised my art should be based on facts that matter to me — that art should be contemplative.”
2004–2013
Coexistence
The inquiry then reached the place it had been travelling toward all along: the compact between humans and the natural world, first watched by a boy in the open country of Vidarbha. Animals entered the work — not as likenesses, and not as ornaments to a human story, but as an autonomous world: elephants, tigers, monkeys, the seed in which, as one canvas has it, a whole world sleeps. Realism fell away entirely; the paintings became allegories of coexistence — of man and beast sharing one earth, one balance, one fate.
The tiger holds a special place in this world: a presence at the heart of Indian history and imagination, painted here with an urgency that is ecological as much as artistic.
In the artist's words:
“Through the last twenty years I have been painting animal allegory. I deliberate much about man and beast coexisting in harmony, and the ecological balance that results. It is my mission to voice the anguish of the tiger — this majestic animal — through my art.”
Today
The Formation
Which brings the story to the present — a new medium, a new scale, and the same inquiry, renewed. The work at the top of this page is not a departure from what came before it. It is what six decades of asking looks like, now.
