Art is to me, more of a therapeutic activity than an ambitious pursuit. Making art helps me destress and unwind.
As you browse my works you will notice common imagery like trees, huts, rivers, and mountains. We all drew huts, trees etc. when we were kids, and I am trying my best to keep that pastoral childhood alive, even as grey hair grow on my head with a vengeance. To me, it is more important to nurture “the child within” than to intellectualize or jargonize my habitual therapeutic exploits.
Back in my school days, I happened to read William Blake’s anthology “Songs of Innocence and Experience”; wherein, a striking contrast is brought forward between our imaginations of the pastoral world of childhood, against an adult world of corruption, repression, disenchantment, and disinheritance. This epic work of William Blake had an everlasting effect on my mind and made me a permanent, and confirmed romanticist.
My works are merely efforts at arriving at increasingly higher levels of simplicity of expression; however, there are a lot of complicated elements at play in the process. I’m also a student of jazz guitar, and jazz music focuses on improvisation. The main goal of jazz musicians is to make melodies interesting by using often very unconventional (and at times complicated) approaches to simple melodies. This is the same principle that drives my artistic process.
Here are a few topics that can help me unpack my art process for you:
Present life regression connection:
I am a person of a scientific bent of mind, and am generally skeptical about esoteric knowledge, religion, the supernatural etc.
However, I have been interested in reading about these topics almost all my life. I am also a keen reader of philosophy and psychology, and have modestly read the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Eric Fromm, and other writers to some extent.
Years ago, I came across some YouTube videos about practitioners of past life regression, most notably Dr. Brian Wiess, who is a scientifically trained and practicing psychiatrist. He started believing in past lives after coming across a patient who, under hypnosis, could recollect events of her deep past. This intrigued me and I studied it in my spare time.
I started thinking if it was possible for me to recollect my past life. One day, I happened to visit a local fortuneteller just for fun. The fortuneteller told me straight away that I was probably born in a foreign society in my past life. The fortuneteller (someone who I had never met before) told me that in my drawings, are representations of wooden cabins, huts, and houses of European design; overcast sky over meadows, and tree of a foreign land etc.; much of which, is not commonly found in my birthplace – India. He went on to elaborate that these could be images of places where I may have been in my past life; and that they are appearing through my art in the present life.
The fortuneteller also told me that I lean towards predominantly western forms of music despite being surrounded by Indian music, which may also indicate traces of a past life in a foreign land. I was a little surprised at this, because when I review my art and music practice in retrospect, what the fortune teller said appears to predominantly true.
However as a skeptic, I think the western influence may be attributed to my predominantly Eurocentric education, as I studied in a reputed catholic school, The St. Xavier’s Boys School in Delhi, during my childhood; and perhaps as a direct result, nurtured a deep interest in Christianity, and Western culture, like so many of my generation who were born into a so called post-colonial society.
I made a joke about all this intrigue, that this is my present life regression, a borrowed melancholia of an unseen land, and time; one that is spoon-fed academically, methodically, and clinically to an entire middle class Indian generation.
Artistic Language
I have been drawing and painting ever since my childhood. As I grew up I decided to take up an art history masters programme in college, and learnt all I possibly could about what happened in art, and when and where etc. Later, I went to work as a curator of art exhibitions from 2002-2010, and now I’m involved in teaching fine art and design to university students. Despite my love for modern (20th century) and contemporary arts such as surrealism, automatism, absurdism, magic realism, conceptual arts, video art, performance art, site specific/ immersive installation etc.; I have also grown a keen interest in traditional forms in Indian, Japanese, and Chinese arts.
I am very attracted to the various treatments of inks and dyes on paper in Asian arts and crafts, and therefore, it is the mainstay of my therapeutic art practice. Ink spreads differently on different kinds of paper, and I enjoy the way one can experiment with this.
Some years ago I did some short online courses on the basics of Chinese calligraphy, where I learned that there is a certain decisiveness to each stroke in calligraphic writing. This intrigued me and I tried to hone my skills. In my mind there is a certain automatism in the act of quick caricaturist brush strokes; and also in the organic spread of ink on moist paper. I love watching ink spread and blot itself into shapes and textures on the paper, and this itself is a very therapeutic experience.
My works are to me. a fusion of folk art; fairytale, comic, childrens’ book illustration; modernist landscapes; and various other influences from the magical world of Asian arts & crafts – all re-mixed into making simple childish drawings, that serve no intellectual purpose as such, and are merely artefacts of my continuous need to simplify.
Musical Influence
Poetry, musicality, and lyricism are central to all that I aspire to indulge in as an artist. Being a jazz music student, it is but obvious that my study of music influences, informs, and improves my art making processes.
I have also been making video art for many years, with a view of merging my music compositions into my visual ideas. I tend to view video editing software as a canvas on which we can experiment with light, color, and movement; and therefore, videos are to me, more like motion–paintings, rather than just video.
To me, making a painting is nearly the same as making a video, writing a song, a poem, or just letting lose some sporadic improvisation of color in songform. It is hard to explain, but it appears to me, that my music practice often affects my art practice far more than any amount of learning or reading about art history, criticism, or analysis.
Benign Eurocentrism (of post-postmodern Indocentrists)
I have been a life long English Literature, Psychology, Mythology, Narratology, and Philosophy fanatic. I am a casual bibliophile who tends to read novels, essays, and critical analysis in these domains of knowledge.
A considerable amount of my time is spent in learning about European history and philosophy; especially the Greek, continental, and analytic cannons. Over the years, I have grown a special interest in stoicism, skepticism, nihilism, and absurdism, having spent time reading about Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Diogenes, from the Greek cannon; European continental writers such as Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzche, Hegel, etc.; and more modern ones such as Camus, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault etc.
My fascination for mythology, history, and archeology has led me to numerous travels to ancient sites; and also introduced me briefly to the study of narratology, and basic linguistics.
In the domain of my personal identity as a person of Indian heritage, I have nurtured a keen interest in Buddhism, and Shaivism; with a particular interest in Shaivitie mythology, belief systems. ritual practices, and oral traditions. In my younger and better days, I had endeavored to draft a series of Lord Shiva’s portraits in painting, each representing one of his 108 names. I did not complete the series, but did in fact paint many modernist interpretations of the names of lord Shiva as a ritual exercise. I often feel that through this exercise of picking a mythological topic, I tried to visually re-manufacture, a somewhat post-postmodern redemption of my own heritage – as an Indian person born in a Hindu family; and put into a foreign cultural context by way of gaining a decent education in a reputed post colonial establishment. The series of Shiva portraits were, an attempt to appease my rich mythological inheritance, and to try and break away from a Eurocentric mindset. This period was for me an important formative experience, and it runs as an undercurrent in all my work (music, art, writing), as concrete evidence of my inherent Indocentrism.
I am aware however, that the term ‘Eurocentrism’ often invites an inimical reaction from many people in this ‘all too globalized 21st century’. However, I try not to participate in colonial and post colonial politics, because growing up in a post colonial world was painful enough anyway. Secondly, we can hardly escape the fact that many generations across nations (and races of people globally) have been educated in the Eurocentric domain, and we can possibly not reverse our learning just to get de-Eurocentricized. Perhaps the best we can do is to be a little stoic about this and embrace what we cannot control or defeat.
This predicament of a natural Indocentrist trapped in a Eurocentric mindset, is perhaps an Amor Fati shared by millions of Indians of my generation; who have availed the many benefits of a western education.
In conclusion, I see my artistic efforts as a constant, and continuous negotiation between three worlds – Art, Music, and Literature.
Thank you.
p. s. If you come this far down the rabbit hole, and still have time to kill, check this out:
