Self-portrait
Lain Singh Bangdel, 1990
Oil on canvas
93 × 108 cm

© Bibhakar Shakya

Bangdel’s variety of subject matter or painting genres was central to his artistic journey. Although he never considered himself a portrait painter, his long struggle in portraiture is testified in numerous portraits from the early 1950s. At that time, he painted many portraits of his wife, friends, and himself. His early portraits emulate the styles of great masters, and later in the 1970s after his style had become more fluid, of abstractionism, as his focus shifted from realist portraiture to looser and freer forms. His aspiration to improve his portrait painting, resulted in many self-portraits, many of which either remained unfinished or were even destroyed. Unlike many others, in which he skilfully captures a mood or an emotion, in this self-portrait, he paints himself as an artist. As one of his later works of the 1990s, in this self-portrait one observes the influence of distortion and modernism.
- Swosti Rajbhandari Kayastha