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STATEMENTS AND BROCHURES

For me each work of art is a discovery, and I believe that there is at the heart of every discovery a certain grace, something as yet undiscovered but nevertheless felt through the veins and felt through  the heart—and this becomes the discovery.  Creation and discovery at the same time, at once. But not everything is entirely without a certain reaching after, a sort of search.

I do not paint with some image in mind, but only with a certain absence that reaches after its own essential form.  I visualize strongly, and feel the space.  The lines my hand shapes and the space my brush fills do the rest.  I do not paint ideas.  I leave it for the pundits of art to play with.  My images are non-verbal and in this they exist outside history and writing.  They are what they are and be; somewhere between here and then.

I believe that all art is abstract. Aren’t we reducing the forms and senses from their existential basis when we re-articulate them in any other recreated mode?  Even thinking and seeing are abstract.

I used to paint landscapes and still do.  My stones of Silence are landscapes of the mind.  There is nothing beyond and behind nature.  This I believe.  And this forms the roots of my inspiration.  I love the earth.  I love the skies.  I love the birds and I love all animals. I love man and woman and child. For me the essence of being is in realizing the passing of being. Everything passes.  Let the colours and forms speak in their language of absence.  My space, my time, my life… Earth Signs. 

EARTH SIGNS, 2000

Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath,Bangalore,February 2000 

These are troubled times.  No land is at peace.  No people without problems. Brother killing brother.  Bomb blasts, shell explosions, death… “the blood-dimmed tide is loose,” and things fall apart!  Terror walks the streets.  Now, where does the artist fit into all these? Who is the artist? What is art? Why art?  Very difficult questions, these.  The artist is one who creates art, and art is one that is created by the artist! And if the artist creates beauty where is it now? Can we find it in the streets, in these bitter battle-grounds, in the glare of bomb blasts, under the rubble of a lost humanity?  Can it save people? But should art be concerned with all these? Where does it all fit?

Some naughty child has upturned the whole jigsaw puzzle and now who is going to put it all back? Well, not the artist, for sure.  For art is about how to see things, people, sensations, being and becoming.  Art is about growing up and growing apart. Art is about life, living, love and death.

Art does not tell you what to do—least of all to kill.  Art is neither statement nor propaganda. It tells you to be.  To see. It is. Art has nothing to do with people who do not see, who hate, break, destroy and kill. Art is…

My paintings are like signboards.  They lead the eye to and away.  They are never static, though.  You see and you move.  I have been drawing and painting ever since I knew myself.  Perhaps it was wise indeed not to have sought academic instruction and sanction.  It has freed me from the straitjackets of training and tradition. To see, discover and design my own path.  And paths we know,  are made by walking.

My art is sudden and transforming.  It is personal and private.  But it never seeks to close—no bounds, no boundaries.  My concerns are never intellectual and ideological in art. They are reflexions of what happens inside my being. It frees my senses.  I see the tree, sense the grove, smell the wood, feel the forest.  I see the path of destruction.  Like the child in the story who sees the emperor’s new clothes for what they are, I shout, I scream: “look, the earth vanishes!” 

Look, the Earth Vanishes

Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi—Durbar Hall, Kochi, 22nd-28th November 2001

 

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