Amitava’s home, just off Bengali market in Delhi where he lives with his wife, painter Mona Rai, is impeccable—an aesthete’s delight. Uncluttered, it’s almost minimalist, with its clean lines and subdued tones. Even his studio is just-so, well pristine. Yet, open a few drawers and you see, neatly put away, the clutter of the world. Tiny, portable clutter that is. For, the painter is an incorrigible collector—a magpie who picks up whatever he fancies, wherever he goes. Metro tickets, museum tickets, garment labels, stamps, stickers, bits and pieces of various civilizations during his globe-trotting days when he worked for the Trade Fair Authority of India/India Trade Promotion Organisation. The list of Amitava’s private “collection” is endless. These comprise his visual memory, his personal alphabets. For the painter they also serve as triggers to memory, universal and his own. A large number of these “items” end up in his works on paper, adding an element of mystery and resonances of elsewhere.
Where in all this is the artist? Amitava likes to punctuate his conversation with quotes: he’s quite the literary artist. Sartre, Camus, Fellini, Bengali poet Jibanananda Das, amongst many others, crop up, as does Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher whose adage, “Live Hidden” appears to have had an enduring influence on him. Amitava has applied the Hellenistic philosopher’s advice to his drawings and works on paper by incorporating his “found objects” into them.
Art historians use the word “assemblage” to describe this method of putting together found objects that was used by Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. It was only later that the word itself slipped into the lexicon of art after Jean Dubuffet titled his collages of butterfly wings “Assemblages d’ empreintes”. Assemblage, according to Amitava allows him to “remain hidden”, because, as he says, “Art is never a statement...it remains like that, an ever growing object.”
The artist likes to hide meanings—and perhaps the man himself—in other ways. “Drawing by elimination” is one such: it reveals and conceals at the same time. He might begin by putting in various elements, including what may be his personal hieroglyphs, before inking them out with black ink. This creates an illusion of memory-depths, adding a kind of instant-archeological layering. One of the works in this exhibition alludes to the artist-as-digger. The image of a strange hybrid—“a caterpillar-human” as Amitava refers to it, could be read as an artist digging the earth, digging it for history. It could also be interpreted as the attribution of the role of archeologist to the artist.
Spanning over three decades—from the 70’s through the first few years of the new millennium—this exhibition of over a hundred works on paper takes us along on a journey of discovery with Amitava. Many of the discoveries have been unexpected or accidental. Sometimes, the material dictates the destination of a drawing. For instance, the handmade khadi paper the artist used in the mid 1970’s was not standardized. Since the outcome was unpredictable, he was able to play with chance.
The alchemy that takes place in the creation of Amitava’s drawings doesn’t take place on his palette. Chances are it will all happen on the paper itself. To be more precise, on the surfaces he chooses. He has used many readymade materials, including expired bromide paper and pages from magazines and newspapers. In the 70’s and early 80’s he experimented with the glossy surfaces of the propaganda material that came in on planeloads from the former Soviet Republic: he used pastels, inks and tried out various techniques that would make the paper absorb the colours.
While there were still remnants of forms in these works, usually a solitary human being or a folksy animal or a hybrid of the two, his appropriation of a few pages of the British daily, Financial Times, when he was in Cannes and Paris in 2002 (Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film Devdas was being screened at the time) produced some interesting results. “I painted over it and found a new visual language. Here I am not referring to the human form but pure abstract work.”
More recently during a visit to New York the drawing book and the black permanent markers with very thick tips he was given by the Gallery that had invited him produced radically different work. Thick black lines morphed into rather squiggly forms that look forebodingly primordial—out of the swamp of the unconscious. Talking about this, Amitava says: “I was on the 42nd floor in Manhattan, upper Eastside. The condo was in this concrete jungle, all vertical. The Gallery gave me an odd-size drawing book—the shape was long, and vertical. In these works some forms I feel are tragic…and in a way life is both- tragic and funny”.
Much of Amitava’s oeuvre has mythical creatures that seem to have sprung from the imagination: half-man, half-animal or even half-angel (Lego-like men with wings)—beings metamorphosing from one species to another. However, there is child-like sense of wonder that comes through in the drawings. Amitava has conjured a world out of music, dreams and poetry, as others before him.
Excerpts from the Interview:
What is, for you, the essential difference between drawing and painting? Do you approach the two differently? Is painting more premeditated?
Drawing is a very intimate medium. When you paint you have to organise your space, your materials. It becomes a totally organizational proposition. Drawing involves a different scale from that of painting. In drawing there is no point of departure: I can start from a corner or the centre. It comes naturally. In painting you are conscious about the format before you begin. Drawing is by itself a complete work of art. And I feel it is not inferior to painting. I never try to translate a drawing or a water colour into a painting. Every medium has its own character. There is, however, a relationship but it is manifested differently. Drawing helps me develop a future language.
Some of the markings in your works on paper have a doodle-like quality about them…as if they were coming out of the unconscious…
The surrealist poet Andre Breton and painter André Masson talked about automation—automatic writing or automatic drawing. A camera can be manual and automatic. Drawing in that sense is also automatic. For a writer or a painter it may come naturally, not word by word. Mason and Henri Michaux were conscious of this process. They were consciously using this device of automation in their works. For me it is not the same process. I don’t wait for that moment to come. I remain thoroughly conscious—and yet it starts playing in my work as I draw or paint. When you approach your drawing it is like an unknown journey where you really don’t know where you are going: you are totally blank about your arrival. When Picasso was asked what he was going to paint he simply said “If I knew before hand what I am going to do then what is the use of doing it”
However, there does appear to be a meditative quality in your works on paper…
Drawing for me is not meditation. My work is not of that nature, certainly not of a spiritual nature. Kandinsky talked about the “spiritual nature of art”. My work is not about the spirit. When I start drawing I feel more intimate with the paper. Painting is more of a physical act whereas drawing is something else. When you play a sitar—do chedkhani with the string--it rebounds. When you touch pen to paper, it rebounds. The ink gets activity.
Does this mean that when you finish a drawing the end product may be very different from what you had in mind when you started? In other words do you surprise yourself?
Drawing is more adventurous, like a journey to the unknown. Many of my drawings are also like travelogues. Drawing allows me to record or to document the local flavour of a place during my travels--it adds a new image or resonance to my works. My work is never programmed even though it contains my reflections on life. The artist’s journey should reflect his experience…It should enable him to experience things differently. I don’t experience violence politically, if I can say that. I would say that my reactions take place on a creative level. Take the first hand experience of blood, of seeing blood flow, my reaction would be more direct.
Can we talk about your childhood? Any experiences at an impressionable age that you feel must have had some bearing on you, both as an artist and as an individual?
Nature has played a very important role in my life and work. I spent my childhood in Shimla. Our house was below Lakar Bazaar. It had so many windows. We could see all around us, with the mountains on the left and vegetation everywhere. Birds used to fly into the house. You see, it was situated at the level of the birds. If you opened one or two windows the birds came in. We used to chase them away, only to free them later. One day a bird was troubling me so much that I kept trying to catch it. And when I finally I succeeded I held it so tightly that it died. This made quite an impression on me. I was about seven at the time.
Did this childhood act that you obviously felt remorse over influence your work as an artist?
Drawing also acts as a memory. It takes you to your past, makes you revisit it. Perhaps the bird incident led me to work on animals. Perhaps, it gave me a love for nature, for flora and fauna. There was a lot of echo there, in our home in Shimla. I used to hear the sound of the pine trees as the afternoon winds blew through them. I could smell the wind laden with the scent of pine. I think growing up in Shimla also gave me a sense of space. At one time my work was minimal, with lots of empty space.
Does your relationship with space change according to your environment?
Until 1969 my drawings and paintings were interior-based, in a closed space as it were. It changed in the mid 70’s when I started teaching at Jamia Millia. To get there I used to take the Ring Road. It was very open on both sides at the time. There was a sense of openness, with the wind, the sky and the open space--especially in the mornings. The Shimla memories came back to me at that time.
The strokes on the paper in many of your drawings appear to me to be arranged like a musical morse code. How important is music in your life and work, and is there a relationship between sound and image in your drawings?
I was fond of classical music, both Hindustani and Western. These days my leanings are towards a more pure form of music like Dhrupad and, ancient chants like the Gregorian or Vedic. When I heard Bach for the first time it gave me the same connotation as Vedic mantras. Both music and poetry played an important role in my work.
Tagore and Rabindra sangeet and all that?
No, it was classical music and the world of books, Particularly Jibanananda Das. Just the sounds in his poems. Some of them take you back--to before time and into the realm of abstract notion. On the other hand I am not interested in stories, or even narration.
Critics often describe your work as brooding, serious, existential even. But I can’t help detecting a sense of humour in some of the images in these drawings. There is an element of playfulness in addition to all that existential angst coming down to us from Sartre and Camus?
(He thinks for a moment before a shy grin lights up his rather serious face) Satyajit Ray’s father Sukumar Roy wrote poems for children. He was one of the nonsense/limerick poets. He wrote these nonsensical poems which were published with his own illustrations. Some of the figures were strange combinations---you could have a character that had the characteristics of both a frog and a donkey. It was a bit like Hieronymus Bosch, with a little touch of Breugel. Or, Kafka with the metamorphosing spider in a humourous sense. (At which point he pulls out a drawing of an animal that could be a goat or a horse or even a donkey.)
Can we talk a little about the dark, brooding element in your work. That sense of anomie, the existential man tossed about in a chaotic universe?
Perhaps there was more angst and struggle in the 70’s. Anger or fear may be reflected in my work of that time. See these gatherings of black. It could be angst. I am not a narrative artist. My elements are manifested in the gathering of the blacks. My wash drawings are a play of water and ink. Wash drawings have to do with how much ink and how much water you use. In traditional Chinese wash drawings water and ink represent the two aspects of male and female. My wash is done step by step. And the last wash has more ink and less water. I have done aquatints as well. It is a very fast process, and the longer you keep them in the acid tray, the blacker they become. In between you get numerous tones of greys and blacks. That may also account for the tragic, brooding and melancholic elements you refer to.
Yes, but there is something else going on here. Some sense of foreboding…
It could be in the use of colours—like my use of red and black. These are the colours of agitation--the gatherings of dark. Mood depicted through colour…during a storm the trees appear to be agitating. Trees can be scary: different images appear depending on the timescale- night or day.
Can we go back to that question of the unpredictable happening in drawing—what you had not foreseen?
I use different materials in my work, like labels, car stickers, stamps and museum tickets—things that I pick up during the course of my travels. The moment they touch the paper the whole thing changes like magic. It ceases to be that label, and becomes an element of visual language. I call them works on paper—not just drawings. I draw with a pen or pencil and explore all kinds of materials that you come across today. For example there are hundred types of pens—from ball point to ink pen, from felt pens to gel pens. These are available in a wide range of colours.
In drawing you can’t correct anything, in painting you can correct an element or a form. You can’t go back in drawing and start again.
Can you talk about the various materials and techniques you have used over the years?
I started making drawings as only drawings in a simple sense. Later, I introduced different elements like black ink, two different shades of inks or pen and croquille. I began to use holder pens, followed by handcrafted wooden pens and pencils of different grades and colour. In the early 70’s I used to draw with a pen. The whole process was one of elimination: you build the forms with outlines and then start the process of elimination by adding lines and more lines and ultimately it becomes a black structure. In the mid 70’s I began to use colour pencils and water proof colour ink, combining them with oil pastels and pencils. In the late 80’s and 90’s assemblages appeared. These works were like travelogues. For the last few years I have been using all kinds of materials--colour pens, new brush pens, Japanese tips, silver and gold metallic markers.
Which artists’ drawings do you admire?
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, one hair-brush drawings of Indian miniatures, Picasso, Klee, Brice Marden, Jeram Patel, Ganesh Pyne, Laxma Goud, Arpita Singh and Himmat Shah, to name a few.
But I think that as far as drawing is concerned the art scene is still in a state of adolescence. Drawing is yet to be recognized as a complete and independent work of art.
© Madhu Jain
(Reproduced with the permission of Gallery Espace, New Delhi)
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