S G Vasudev

Artville Artist Of The Day
S G Vasudev
Title: Tree Worshippers
Size: 123 x 154 cms
Year: 2006

Vasudev’s themes often spill into one another and they reappear over and again, like old refrains. The Vriksha turns up to meld with the Earthscapes. The Maithuna and the Theatre of Life converge at some point. It is, therefore, no surprise that today Vasudev’s work is close to his work of the early 70s. He uses similar lyrical lines, the feathering out of images and the clear, brilliant colours that were used then. This merging of images and renewal of ideas give his work both freshness and familiarity. When you see a new Vasudev work, you recognise a familiar motif and yet there is always something new. The Vriksha never regains its guileless gaiety but it does acquire a new intensity. Vasudev recounts how years ago, at the time when he was starting out in his career in the early 70s, it was imperative to search deep into the past for new ideas. This paradox describes his idiom well.
courtesy:vasudevart.
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Riyas Komu

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Riyas Komu
Title: Man Laughing
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 60 x 48 in 

Riyas Komu produces politically charged paintings, sculptures and installations that channel difficult subjects including religion and identity. He grew up in Kerala, where both his father and uncle were politicians and subsequently influenced his world view—planting the drive to tackle and critique government policy and affairs. Perhaps best known for his portraiture, he captures extreme emotions, their intensity understood to be fuelled by the plights of contemporary India. The compositions are always cropped tightly around the face, lest we pay attention to anything but the human subject and the physicality of socio-political inequalities, or of war or of dissolute poverty. Recently, he has focused on several football-related projects, which includes a large scale sculpture installation at the Pompitue Centre in Paris in 2010 and a series of portraits of Indian National Team soccer players.
courtesy:aicon

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Jitish Kallat

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Jitish Kallat 
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris. Photo : Iris Dreams, Mumbai 

Jitish Kallat deliberately places divergent fields of stimuli next to each other as if to force a dialogue between representation and abstraction, history and myth, the past and the present, the identifiable and the incongruous. Shown in ‘The Hour of the Day of the Month of the Season’, plates left at the dinner table become a constellation of planets, a mattress metamorphoses into a motorway bridge, seven rotis (an Indian bread) become lunar cycles that appear out of nowhere only to vanish once again. An installation of reduced-scale sculptures takes the form of a miniature allegorical theatre, where the poses struck by the characters, travellers being searched at an airport checkpoint, bring to mind a ceremonial dance. In the artist’s recent paintings, a daily commute becomes a fertile breeding ground for a range of imagery, to erupt, festooning a given moment with densely layered meaning.
courtesy:the-art-markets
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Azis TM

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Azis T.M.
Untitled 2
Oil on Canvas 
Size: 10x10" 
Year: 2010

"I have never been particular about maintaining a style. I realize that experiences change with time. I accept the new environment, people and also like to adapt new techniques and colors".

Originally from Kerala, T.M. Azis is known to create human figures interacting with the other elements in a painting. Figures or objects performing as symbols spinning around allegories as conceived by the artist. He creates paintings, which record what might be ordinary, everyday occurrences, contemplated by him. A certain insight into behavioral thought, we realise that there is a world different from what see – the world that exists in our minds.

It is interesting to note that there are no decisive tactics, no fixed strategies in his work. Azis allows himself to be influenced by places around him and situations that he encounters. Simple objects and people in their vicinities rejoice in their existence by being involved in what is around.

The paintings do not project a grand décor, and even with its simplicity there is a certain magic and lightness about it. The different conversations performed by figures with the ‘designs’ lines or concentric circles in the paintings pleasantly create subtle movements on the surface reciting a visual rhythm to the viewer.

The paintings are constructed using bright colors sometimes and sometimes not so contrasting colors, which plainly have strong individual personas expressing a subtle theater of visual form.

In today’s contemporary art scenario, artists are fast adapting to new trends. T.M. Azis, primarily a painter, has also a prolific collection of photographs taken during the collaborative projects with other artists.

A graduate in painting from the Trivandrum Art College, he went further on to study at the Jamia Mila Islamia University in Delhi. He had his first show in the late 80’s and since then has held a number of solo exhibitions. He has also participated in several group shows in Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi and been a part of numerous camps held across the country.
courtesy:saffronart

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Maya Burman

Artville Artist Of The Day
Maya Burman
Medium: Water Color On Paper

"I find I must enter the fantasy world of children in order to paint."

Maya Burman, is the daughter of the well-known painter Sakti Burman. The striking thing about her paintings is the amount of detail in them. In formal terms Maya Burman`s paintings have a tapestry like effect where everything is subordinate to patterning, reminiscent of the French art nouveau tradition. The figures have an archetypal aura about them and their rendering in a clean decisive manner has its sources in Picasso`s later classical period, his return after the war into an idyllic land inhabited by healthy and young boys of Athenian ideal.

Maya Burman`s technique is a slow step-by-step process of accumulation of marks. She makes a pencil sketch first, then applies the layer of water colours and finishes the outlines and detail in black ink with a pen. There is certain precision to the rendering, a legacy perhaps of her training as an architect, which contrasts nicely with the ambiguities of the themes that she handles. The paintings are a meeting ground of two cultures - Indian as well as French. The details of Indian miniature painting and European Middle Age architecture merge in her art, and literature and poetry are also very much present as they provide her with new images, as the poetry of Spanish Frederico Garcia Lorex or the Japanese `Iku`. Her compositions are mostly figurative and change according to her mood.

Ms. Burman lives in Paris but in her paintings she retires to a land of lyricism and allegory.
courtesy: saffronart

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Baiju Parthan

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Baiju Parthan
Archeology-Kerala-1
Year: 2007
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 72 x 72 in 


Initially, Baiju Parthan resisted a career as an artist. "In Kerala," he explains, "you are what your work is. And in Kerala's Communist schema, the artist is at the lowest rung of society." Parthan began as an engineer, but was drawn into the world of art in 1974, when he stumbled onto a book detailing the history of Western art. "With that book," he says, "the chronology and the institution of art became known to me." He became familiar with the movements of Impressionism, Expressionism, and so forth, and this new knowledge nourished his interest in painting.

"Painting gave me self worth," says Parthan. "In that pictorial space, I was king. I began to define myself through this act of painting: It was the only place where I could 'be'." Excited by the prospect of studying art, Parthan went to Goa and enrolled in a five-year course in the fine arts. Parthan's course, running from 1978-1983, overlapped with the final influx of Westerners coming to Goa in search of enlightenment.

"There were Germans, Brits, Italians - all sorts of people, mostly from Europe. I came across these hippies, and became exposed to a whole range of alternate world views," says Parthan, adding "I had always thought that reality is one unified thing."

Through one of his Western acquaintances, Parthan came across Sartre's "Age of Reason," a book that he describes as a major influence. Also affecting his work at the time was Goa's "soft drug culture". This, too, helped Parthan explore new ways of experiencing the world.

Parthan began to study the Indian mystical arts, exploring tantra, ritual arts, and Indian mythology. Simultaneously, Western art continued to exert an influence. Parthan names Larry Rivers, Miro, and the Cubist painters as important models.

In the early 1980s, Parthan decided to quit painting. "I felt like a missionary for Western art," he explains. Instead, he enrolled in a course on comparative mythology at Bombay University, and began working as a writer and illustrator. He returned to painting in the early 1990s, when he began to explore the imagery of mandalas and Tibetan tangas. These traditional subjects were balanced by his reading in post-modern theorists. The latter enabled him to "recontextualize things from my immediate environment. The post-modern theorists have accepted the localization of reality. We're now reconciled to the idea of an individual reality. Art is about local realities. Personally, I live in a post-colonial concept of space. The world exists as a flux."

In 1995, Parthan began to study computers, learning hardware engineering, building his own machine, and creating programs. "I didn't want to be afraid of technology," says Parthan. "The machine has become the Other for humans, and it raises philosophical issues that we have to grapple with." Parthan is especially interested in the influence of technology on religious beliefs, the implications of genetic engineering, and the possibilities of post-humanism (i.e. the development of symbiotic relations between men and machines).
Based on:
Catalogue by Ranjit Hoskote
Interview by Sylee Gore
courtesy:saffronart

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Samir Mondal

Artville Artist Of The Day 
Samir Mondal 
Title: From the series ‘Dhusar Pandulipi- The Faded Manuscript’, on poems of noted poet Jibanananda Das 
Medium: Water Color On Hand Made Paper 
Size: 56 X 76 cm

Traditionally watercolours were always characterised by a soft weightless feel and a foggy appearance to create a soothing illusion of perspective and depth. I tried my best to stay clear of this, and break the traditionalism by incorporating definite structure and bolder colour to my style. I guess to understand the evolution of my style, it’s important to understand the very character of watercolour painting. Every brush stroke involves some sort of modulation and variation in pigment deposition, unlike oil painting which is uniform throughout a stroke. This character was used to represent outdoor themes and landscapes as close to reality as possible. But today with a camera, which can truly represent perspective and dimension flawlessly, I thought of moving away from the traditional application of watercolours and to use the two dimensional space of my paper with motifs and play with the lack of perspective depths.
During my learning phases, I was overwhelmed by the works of many western greats, from the simple everyday objects and vibrant colours of Van Gogh to the bold and dynamic visualisation of Robert Rauschenberg. From impressionist visualizations to Fauvism of Henri Matisse, all these great workers and their works have had a huge impact in developing my style. None of them used pure watercolour to express themselves. So I tried to incorporate the modern visual language into a new medium. I tried to use simpler everyday motifs, bolder structured forms and strokes, compose abstract areas with more detailed subjects in the same plane, use absurd and vibrant colours, etc. In fact some of my works reflect the treatment of colours and structural quality associated with oil paintings rather than watercolours, this is one of the conscious efforts to diverge from the traditional watercolour applications.
Also I tried to experiment with the size of the paintings. I have done some really massive works in watercolours to give the powerful and dynamic visual appeal one associates with other mediums. My style today involves the influences of different cultures, themes, styles and techniques that I have been exposed to throughout my career. They are forever evolving, learning from the medium itself. I love the accidents and unpredictability of the medium, the happenings from the mixing and merging of the medium beyond our control. I am merely guiding these processes to a meaningful conclusion.
courtesy: samirmondal

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Bhupen Khakhar

Artville Artist Of The Day
Bhupen Khakhar
Untitled
Size: 956x1024

Bhupen Khakhar was born in Bombay in 1934 into a middle class Gujarati family. His father died when Khakhar was four years old, and his mother, Mahalaxmi, brought up the children. In keeping with the expectations of the successful mercantile classes, Khakhar initially trained as an accountant, graduating with degrees in commerce and administration. He began painting in the early 1960s. He moved to the University town of Baroda, north of Bombay, where he completed a degree in Art Criticism at the Fine Art Faculty at the M.S. University. Khakhar thus comes to painting relatively late. His early works draw on his interest in the imagery of Indian popular culture – cinema posters, calendar art and street kitsch. This interest is now less apparent in the work of Khakar, who has become an established artist and one of India’s foremost contemporary painters.
courtesy:escapeintolife

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