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Lot Essay
"A beautiful country full of rice fields and palm trees; whitewashed churches with lofty steeples; small houses with imbricated tiles, painted in a variety of colours. Glimpses of the blue sea. Red Roads curving over hills and straight across paddy fields. Rich Green foliage, mango trees, birds, serpents, frogs, scores of butterflies and a thousand kinds of insects." (F N Souza, 'A Fragment of Autobiography', Words & Lines, 1997, New Delhi, p. 9)
More than merely the birth place of Francis Newton Souza, Goa provided an environment and stimulus which shaped his formative forays into the arts, a place that would inform a lifelong career. Although his stimulus may have been a traditional one, Souza's experiments with form and colour at the time were considered revolutionary, provoking a range of reactions from critics and the public. Writing about these almost primitive paintings, Dr. Hermann Goetz, curator of the Baroda Museum and one of Souza's early patrons, noted, "He has shocked many who cannot imagine a green or blue-red human body [...] who cannot stand a simplification intended to intensify an experience, or a distortion of proportions suggesting a sense of earthbound heaviness, ghoulish obsession, lightness or spiritualisation, who cannot face the frank statement of sex which is sublimised not by suppression but by association and interplay with the experiences of the soul." ("Rebel Artist Francis Newton", Marg, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1949)
More than merely the birth place of Francis Newton Souza, Goa provided an environment and stimulus which shaped his formative forays into the arts, a place that would inform a lifelong career. Although his stimulus may have been a traditional one, Souza's experiments with form and colour at the time were considered revolutionary, provoking a range of reactions from critics and the public. Writing about these almost primitive paintings, Dr. Hermann Goetz, curator of the Baroda Museum and one of Souza's early patrons, noted, "He has shocked many who cannot imagine a green or blue-red human body [...] who cannot stand a simplification intended to intensify an experience, or a distortion of proportions suggesting a sense of earthbound heaviness, ghoulish obsession, lightness or spiritualisation, who cannot face the frank statement of sex which is sublimised not by suppression but by association and interplay with the experiences of the soul." ("Rebel Artist Francis Newton", Marg, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1949)