New Delhi, April 10 (IANS) In this age of digitisation of art, lines, drawing, figures and manual artistic skill have taken a backseat. To highlight the importance of these basics, the capital’s oldest art display house, the Dhoomimal Gallery, is holding an exhibition of 100 works by 80 artists.

‘Drawing: The Essence II’ shows the importance of line, strokes and basic drawing in the journey of Indian art – from its pristine classical forms to modernism, abstraction and complex digital play.

Some of the works are timeless. A mother and child charcoal line drawing in black and white on paper by Jamini Roy dating back to the 1940s shows that an artist does not need anything more than a charcoal pencil and a few spartan strokes to convey the bond between a mother and child on paper.

A 1931 pen and ink sketch of a portly Oriental man, ‘Man Vi’, by Sailoz Mookherjee speaks of his mastery over strokes and figurative drawing, while a collection of seven pen and ink figure drawings by F.N. Souza spanning over two decades between 1950s and 1970s is just a few fluid strokes that capture the contours of the human body.

Some of the other artists featured in the show include Krishen Khanna, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jatin Das, M.F. Husain, Laxma Goud, Paritosh Sen, Sunil Das, Satish Gujral, Seema Kohli, V.S. Adurkar, Zainul Abedin, Aambadas, J. Swaminathan and Arpita Singh.

‘We were losing sight of lines in the last few years and decided to highlight its importance. Lines and strokes were the bulwark of masters like Sailoz Mookherjee, F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain and Nandalal Bose,’ said Uma Jain of the Dhoomimal Gallery.