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ARTS: IN CONVERSATION
Thought Freeze
The pre-work meanderings of 26 artists' minds are glamorised
in a show that focuses on their sketchbooks rather than the finished paintings
or drawings
By Anshul Avijit
 Santiniketan
artist Jogen Choudhury is renowned for his black chubby lines that usually
define animals like goats and lions or couples recumbent on jute-knit
cots. Shallow colouring in pastels or acrylics fills the black chassis
and usually there isn't much to upset the safe formula of figure and frame.
That is, until you peep into his sketchbooks and discover that Choudhury
also thinks in words, both English and Bengali. Sample this: "Image-making/art
works based on images are powerful expressions of man and life. I don't
think that they will ever be stopped. They will, however, be renewed as
created." Or, "Artists will choose their direction as per their
conviction and attitude." A simple, non-clever observation about
the future of figure-making ... and the mind of an artist obsessed with
them.
 There
are many such insights, some contrived others convincing, in the exhibition
called "In Conversation", on at Delhi's Gallery Espace till
October 13. It is a curatorial swerve-instead of showing the regular paintings
and drawings of 26 well-known artists, where the element of surprise would
be nominal, the show focuses, through sketchbooks, on those pre-work moments
where the painter is involved in an internal dialogue. Something like
the training schedule of an athlete before a big match or the rehearsals
and retakes before a movie star finally gets his act together. The stage
where ideas are born, feelings archived and references fastened.
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INTERNAL DIALOGUE: Ray captures his
thought process (top left); Khakhar's pop-out folder in water colours
(above); Sundaram seeks inspiration from the French cave paintings
(top right)
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Art historian Gayatri Sinha who put the show
together says, "It is in the sketchbook that the artist moves from
the familiar to the unfamiliar, records impressions and allows himself
the luxury of making mistakes ... without the need to 'finish' a work.
And even when the finished work leaves the studio, the sketchbook stays
behind." Obviously, not any more. The fanciful and humble bedrock
of ideas is now being accorded the gallery-lit glamour it always deserved.
Some of the artists have been less self-conscious
about a private exercise going public. Take Arpita Singh's thick, hard-bound
sketchbook for 1993-1994 that begins with noting down painter Amit Ambalal's
Ahmedabad number in soft pencil. Most of its 50-odd pages have well-chiselled
sketches and field notes of urbanscapes, multi-limbed goddesses with dots
and dashes or figures on a wallpaper of alphabets ... sketches that warm
up for bigger saleable works. Other pages are more like a journal of words
and shapes; one of a lady in a dress is accompanied with the annotation,
"Alison came to see me. She does not look like this. But she too
had tea. P (presumably Paramjit, her painter-husband) goes to Amritsar
on 17th." Some others have pulse rates and blood pressure jottings
of her family-the blurring of lines between an indulgence in art and the
more pressing reality of monitoring health ... wherever possible.
Krishen Khanna, a particularly skilled draughtsman,
didn't mind showing his sketchbooks, nor did his communicative colleagues
like Ambalal and Manjit Bawa. The majority, however, proved to be more
diffident, giving only fabricated accounts of their pre-image minds and,
inadvertently, exposing a more tentative side of their painter persona.
Bhupen Khakhar does maintain sketchbooks but
for the show did a pop-out folder of watercolours showing temples, dogs
and their masters, jumbled foliage and a trademark sketch of himself,
acutely ithyphallic and about to have sex with an equally aroused doppelganger.
(Khakhar is gay and likes to playfully remind viewers that he is.)
Nilima Sheikh, also from the figurative Baroda
tradition, adopted another simulated strategy of foldable screens with
bristly watercolours, like that of a woman sitting on her haunches and
drenching the plains with menstrual solvents.
Vivan Sundaram, once an avid sketcher but having
since graduated to more conceptual post-modern idioms like installations,
went a step further, pre-empting the idea/formation phase to prepare a
completely definitive work. His "Traces of a Prehistoric Figure",
a frisky file of photocopies on transparent filmsheets, was based on cave
painting of a bending woman found in France that went on to heroically
represent mankind's artistic birth and development. In it, perhaps, lay
Sundaram's very own.
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