Gods and Goddesses are rather tricky beings to paint. They are memory and mythological reference points. They are part of restrictive iconography defined by tradition and collective connection. And yet in GS Shenoy's hands, Ganesha becomes a personality. Living energy. An abstract idea. A personal God rather than a collective one. This Ganesha is detailed but not literally. He is texture and rhythm and emotion. Like a graphic novelist, he paints Ganesha with communicative vigour and there is even an unusually raudra Ganesha destroying a foe. Against backdrops that are occasionally calm like a sleeping sea, and sometimes busy like a mosaic, Shenoy's Ganesha sits like a stone sculpture, hewn out of rock and stone. And sometimes, he is just a nucleus of a primordial fire, waiting to evolve into something magnificent. He is a fiery drawing, a mixed media flurry...layered and subliminal and sublime. As as an oil on canvas, he is dancing light and still shadow. Sometimes, his texture reminds you of weather-worn slate and of scrunched paper and of excavated relics. And somewhere along the way, GS Shenoy transforms a God into an obliging subject who is teased, is playfully conversed with and painted adoringly and lovingly.