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PROFILE:
AMIT AMBALAL
Painter
Of Parodies
His canvases
strike the right balance between surprise and humour
By
Anshul Avijit
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| Ambalal
says common things inspire his works |
Artist
Amit Ambalal, a pictorial late bloomer, is pretty funny. At his show at
Delhi's Gallery Espace, his second solo this year, private and public
parody combine in sharp gouache tones to produce the requisite balance
of surprise and chuckles. Ever seen a calf looking longingly at swollen
udders while a man takes the feed-crouched inside the cow's stomach? Or
a langur, the simian face of technological angst, showing his displeasure
for inorganic realities (maybe online thesaurus, e-education and microwave
dinners) and longs for the simple swings of arboreal life? Or when the
artist's golden retriever, gorging himself on a stubbornly arthropod diet,
falls sick, the X-ray shows that vermin have made themselves comfortable
in their new intestinal home. "I take images from day-to-day life,"
says Ambalal, 63.
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| A Brush
with the ordinary: Underground |
Life wasn't
always so creative for the artist. His great-grandfather, an enterprising
Gujarati, established a huge textile factory in Ahmedabad of which Ambalal
was to later become a reluctant managing director. Father was a nice man
- "gave me a lot of freedom" - but in those days, a youngster
showing interest in anything other than accountancy and labour laws was
perceived as being ruinously flippant. So when Ambalal was encouraged
to draw at Leena Sarabhai's school, Shreyas ("Those years probably
made my artistic future"), he was yanked off and given tuitions at
home. The next school, St Xavier's, was no better-too much discipline,
too little art. So Ambalal kept away from the scorned brush, graduated
in humanities and law, got married, had children and dutifully (and miserably)
ran his textile mill: "God, it was torture."
In 1979,
at the age of 36, it was time for a reawakening and a renewal. For replacing
the tie-coat enslavement with the artsy panache of the kurta pyjama. And
the ceremonious "Seth Sahab" with the offhand "Amit Bhai".
Ambalal finally got rid of his nemesis, the textile factory, and plunged
into the colourful world of pastels and pictorials.
But the
apparently naive images with the trademark humour didn't come immediately.
"The process was more or less trying to get back my lost childhood
... of trying to see things with a fresh eye. But most of the time I would
destroy the painting if I thought it had no element of surprise or mischief,"
he says. The early portraits show a kind of stiffness, an acerbity that
is mainly because of an initial euphoria for academics.
A Happy
Hiatus: There was also an interim period of what Ambalal calls his
"childhood drawings". A kind of Baroda-style pastiche (in the
narrative tradition of Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohamed Sheikh) in acrylic
with small skits from his formative life-living in his grandfather's mansion,
going with his grandmother to hear katha and visits to babus' offices.
But the novelty was wearing off and he was getting graphically exhausted.
Out of this
period of deep dissatisfaction emerged the fun and the humour. About 10
years down from his second birth, Ambalal was infatuated by the cat-like
leela of Nathdwara, an assimilation of elements from the Company School,
popular kitsch and photography. Ambalal had been collecting Nathdwara
art and pichwais since college, but it was only after a votive visit to
the temple in upland Udaipur in 1987 that crystallised the intermittent
interest into a lasting commitment.
Correspondingly
there was also a shift in figural imagery-forms became more individualistic,
more stylised and, at the same time, much more lax. "Nathdwara are
happy paintings and all the participants are of equal importance in the
compositions. The cow or the lotus are never above the human being. That
touched me." So a lot of animals make a frisky entry into the redefined
oeuvre: facetious peacocks are vermilion with spots of algae green (The
Long White Turban, 1993), burnt sienna goats have black heads, tigers
lick pink tulips and pink-veined baboons leave red droppings. And for
the humour: an inverted yogi, presumably with indigestion, discharges
a trail of dark, rain-bearing wind. The peacocks rejoice.
In the show
at Gallery Espace, many of the watercolours also abound in organs. A take-off
on gossip would have the inner configuration of the ear as if to amplify
the feeling of sound in transit. Cows have aortas, humans have vermicular
cerebellums, dogs have bones and crows have tubes. This anatomical fixation
was a result of Ambalal's "frozen shoulder" in 1998 (doctors
said it's due to artists excessively using their arms). "That's when
I realised the body and all its parts have their own identity."
The future?
A time for happy hiatus. "After taking one crop you allow the soil
to lie fallow. To get energised to bear life again," he says. So
he's going to gorge on a strictly vegetarian diet of dal dokris and ragda
pattis. And maybe, when the time is right, he'll do an X-ray of himself
and then paint a picture of it.
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