Ghana Shyam Latua is a contemporary artist known for his landscape paintings which he creates with novel pinprick techniques. A graduate of Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, his work speaks of his love for pure, uninhabited landscapes and his lament for nature's destruction by the expansion of urbanization and tourism. As a student, he was initially inspired by the works of Santiniketan masters – Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij and others – but his perception significantly changed later, becoming more complex and critical. Laltua's recent work marks a transition from his earlier concept of romantic geography to political geography in which nature is both destroyed and maintained by modern society.
Instead of conventional techniques, Latua develops his unique style, creating the image partly with ink and pricking and peeling off the paper's surface. The coexistence of the inked and spectral, white pinpricked drawing in a single work gives the viewers unique tactile and visual sensations. The technique that reveals the interplay between ground and image, presence and absence, helps to capture the dialectics between nature and culture, pointing to the ecological concerns of our time. Although he spends considerable time in the studio to finish a single work, he never stops observing and studying nature outside it. The remarkable finesse and detailing in each of his work are born out of the lived interaction.