Soumen Das, originally from West Bengal, has made Baroda his home for nearly 17 years. He finished his undergraduate and graduate studies from the faculty of Fine Arts and decided to live in the city, where he feels most comfortable.

Soumen's shy and self-effacing demeanor hides a fiery painter who is not afraid of traversing a lonely path. His strength lies in his belief. Soumen believes the process of painting is as important, if not more, as the final image. He also believes it is possible to pursue that taboo word 'beauty' in his quest. He has managed to hold on to a classic painterly temperament because like all believers he has the inherent faith and a dogged perseverance.

The painter in Soumen has been dealing with landscapes and architectural spaces as the springboard for his explorations for years. It goes from the simple line drawings to the overlapping layers of broad swathes of colour, a variety of marks and patterns that almost obscure the original design and verges on the abstract, well, nearly but not quite. If this sounds like a recipe of formalism then look again. The works speak of light and air that enliven the empty courtyards, vast open spaces, sun-bathed foliages, the looming domes and minarets of forgotten monuments. There are no humans in sight yet they are remarkably alive, emotionally charged and hauntingly beautiful.

As a contemporary landscape painter, Soumen's work is both genuine and fresh. Genuine in his use of the traditional genre without mockery and fresh in his ability to make discoveries within this tried and tested realm.

Years of research and experimentation in natural pigments, organic colours, rarely used mediums like casein tempera on all manners of surfaces like washli, Nepalese paper, cloth and handmade paper bestows considerable expertise but Soumen is not easily satisfied. His recent body of work is entirely in oil on canvas, a medium he is equally comfortable in. There are two very noticeable shifts in these works: The colours are quite far removed from his favoured pastel shades in the earlier body and veering towards a dazzling rawness and secondly, the drawing element resurfacing in a pronounced way in the penultimate layer implying a move towards solid structuring. Both the freshness of colour and the emphatic lines assert a newfound confidence that comes from the complete mastery of the craft of painting.