The early attempts in landscape, along with the sketches he did while continuing his rather monotonous job in a ghat of the river Jhelum must have been good enough as his landscapes, even when painted at the back of motorized vehicles, were instrumental in his getting spotted by S.H. Raza while on a holiday in Srinagar. In 1950, Santosh joined the Progressive Arts Association in Kashmir, formed as a result of Raza’s effort to mobilize Kashmiri painters. He showed across India as a member of the association. In 1954, he won the government scholarship to study Fine Arts under painter N.S. Bendre at the MS University in Baroda.

He was enrolled as a non-formal student in its art facility and continued his art study by devoting all his attention to landscapes he loved the most. He became so adept with this branch of art that Bendre advised him to make a brief stop and study human form for a change. Soon enough, he gave up landscapes for quite some time in order to perfect his skill in portraiture. After his scholarship tenure, Santos came back to his homeland and continued his landscapes with the infusion of ‘cubist’ ideas he got fascinated with at Baroda. Santosh had already mastered the art of applying colours on canvases and ability to draw his chosen subjects in any form, realistic or otherwise. It was his spiritual quest that in the prime of his youth took him to study Tantric texts and getting familiarised with its secretive rituals.

He began to create his own artistic vocabulary around these yogic anatomy and went on to add visual imagery of fire and water, tranquility and turbulence, nocturnal peace and enlightened divinity in his paintings. His personal art soon became over-filled with precise imagery of various mantras which he internalized in order to paint his own version of unity of Purusha and Prakriti, of Shiva and Shakti. Santos received the Sahitya Academy Award for his book of poems Besukh Rug in 1979, two years after he was awarded Padma Shri. His poetries may be seen as an extension of his philosophy on life as well as something he felt comfortable in expressing, not with paint but words alone. He once said, while in conversation with KL Kaul, that each of his paintings is a vibration and that he consciously tries to engage the sense of hearing through the medium of sight.

Text Reference:
Excerpts from the book G.R. Santosh Perennial Transcendence by Arun Ghose published by Sanchit Art