This is freedom," he says. Freedom from economics, at last -- a subject he has been shackled with since a long time. His first brush with it came when he did his masters in the subject from Delhi University in 1945. Though defined by his qualifications, this 21 year old was sure that his life could take only one course: art. At a time when making a career out of painting was unheard of, Ramkumar knew that he had found his calling. So, it was back to economics -- of life, when he took odd jobs to fund his passion.

For four years he took evening art classes and freelanced as a journalist, a writer and a translator. "I remember, I was given Rs 500 in those days for translating Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in Hindi. A very big sum then," he says. Five years later he had gathered enough confidence to hold hisfirst exhibition -- in Simla, in 1949. He sold four paintings there for Rs 50 each. Then the same year he left for Paris to study art under Andre Lhote and Fernard Leger. And here, he had his first brush with liberation. Studying in France till 1952, Ramkumar saw Paris in the height of Leftist days just after World War II. He mingled with writers, painters and poets who had strong Leftist leanings. This exposure shaped his early works canvases that are dominated by the distress and despair of urban life. "Even if I hadn't been in that atmosphere I think I would have veered toward these topics, there is an inclination toward the tragic side of life in me," he says.

That leaning reached its zenith in Benares. Ramkumar and M F Husain went there in 1961 on a whim but he found himself drawn back many times over the next 10 years. "It was my first direct confrontation with the problems I had been facing," he says. Exiled, tonsured widows, swathed in white who carried no bundles of hope, the old who haddragged their wasted bodies to the banks of this sacred city to die, the millions of pilgrims whose came to bathe in the Ganges, were all the embodiments of the sadness which was second to his skin. But the sea of humanity in Benares also overawed him. "How could I depict thousands of faces there realistically and do justice to them? So, I eliminated them from the canvas and worked only with abstract motifs," he says. Ramkumar's Benares paintings thus, have the ghats, the palaces, the steps, the boats but no people.

By mid '70s, after the peak phase of his fascination with Benares, he gave up figuratives completely. He concentrated on landscapes but even those had a very abstract look they showed mere hints of topography. The mountains, a regular theme because of a childhood spent in Simla, are jagged wedges, the roads rough lines and the trees streaks of green. And his palette too is a reflection of his inclination toward the dark. "I am not very happy with reds and yellows so they don't become veryeloquent in my work," he says.

The shift to landscapes was also liberating for him as he found the specifications of the human body restricting, "You can have only two arms and two legs. But trees, I can paint one or 20," he says. In the '80s, after the emotional Benares phase, his concentration was was more on the pictorial side of composition and its organisational complexities. "I like to take an idea, something small and go deeper into it. Till I feel I have done enough, maybe half a dozen canvases or so, and can't go further," he says. And these days he is doing exactly what he likes to do painting everyday without disturbance. His latest exhibition, acrylic and oils on canvas, has no one source, just paintings which he wanted to do. Some are a result of his visit to his son's house in Auckland, New Zealand, some are hills and some water. In Mumbai for only three days, he already longs for his studio in Delhi and for the rhythm of his palette knife moving on a canvas.