Artville Artist Of The Day
Artist: Murali Cheeroth
Untitled
Size: 122x213cm
Medium: oil on canvas
Murali Cheeroth (b.1966, Kerala)
Cheeroth received his BFA and MFA in Painting from Shantiniketan and was the recipient of the Kerala State Laid Kara Akademi Award (1998). He also held a Junior National Research Fellowship from 1997-1999. Cheeroth looks to development, re-construction and infrastructure as subject matter for his bold visual language. His work often engages with the notion of an urban identity as he examines the ever-changing interstices of local and global identities.
courtesy:indigoblueart
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Artville Artist Of Day
Riyas Komu
Title: Woman Footballer,
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size 78 x 68 in
The artist’s oeuvre, spanning several different media and genres, is particularly noticed for its strong political overtones. His paintings, to put it in his own words, carry a protest symbol one way or the other. He has remarked, “I strongly feel it is my duty to be political. I believe that my paintings should look back at the viewer rather than just tell a story or hang on the wall.”
Influenced by his father’s political leanings and his own brief associations with political student groups, Komu is keen on using his work to “ring alarm bells” about the explosive urban situation he encountered in Mumbai. His body of work references the paradoxes of the urban situation, where on one hand, there is glamour, and on the other, abject poverty. Creating his pieces with equal doses of compassion and cynicism, Komu’s work reflects both hope and dejection – a tribute to the spirit of all those who continue to survive the city and its paradoxes.
courtesy:saffronart
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Artville Artist Of The Day
Bose Krishnamachari
Title: Stretched Bodies
Medium: Acrylic On Canvas
Size: 5ft X 3ft
Year: 2013
Bose Krishnamachari is an artist and curator whose artistic practice includes bold abstract paintings, figurative drawings, sculpture, photography and multimedia installations. While stylistically varied, a common thread throughout his work is a critique of power structures that operate within the art world and more broadly in contemporary society. In his first solo show in 1990, Krishnamachari deployed a minimalist style, producing an abstract black on black with white perforated paper, reminiscent of Braille. As viewers could neither touch nor read the language an ironic comment on contemporary culture, and art gallery decorum in particular could be understood.
In both his art and his curating, Krishnamachari examines the art historical canon and exposes its inequalities. De-Curating – Indian Contemporary Artists, 2003, included 94 sketches and paintings of living Indian artists – both well-established and emerging practitioners. The works resulted from three years of travelling across India, meeting, talking, photographing and drawing. This journey was, in his words, ‘a hand-made tribute to the memory of that “whole-time worker”, the artist’ and undermines the value judgements of art history, presenting the artists as equally significant. Krishnamachari’s desire to support and promote lesser-known artists also extends to his curatorial activities he has previously devised exhibitions that offer Indian artists visibility in larger cities and opportunities for exposure within the international contemporary art world.
Other works by Krishnamachari look beyond the art world, and seek to examine the psyche of the ‘average Mumbaikar’ and make visible what he describes as the ‘ocean of anxieties that have arisen from the everyday question of acceptance’. One series includes six large ballpoint pen portraits of household staff from the artist’s Mumbai residence, as well as 108 photographic portraits of individuals who participant in the artist’s life, keeping alive the encounters he had with them. These works are a reminder of how the wealth and class are still dividers in contemporary Indian society.
The large-scale multimedia installation Ghost / Transmemoir 2008 takes a different approach to mapping Mumbai. The work comprises 108 used tiffin boxes suspended from a frame and wired with headphones and miniature screens. Tiffin boxes play a central role in Indian life, with millions being filled daily by housewives, collected, exchanged, re-exchanged and sorted until the right home-cooked lunch reaches the right office-worker. Overall, the installation captures some of the buzz and chaos of the street, while the small screens present interviews with people from Mumbai. These portray their thoughts, celebrations, frustrations, religions and emotions, and are a reminder of the individual voices and stories to be found amongst a total of 20.8 million Mumbaikar.
In another installation, Krishnamachari takes a more overtly political standpoint, commenting on the press conference platforms used by the perpetrators of war to justify their actions. White Builders and the Red Carpets, 2008, presents 108 microphones on a long red table, poised for a press conference. Behind the table, 13 white chairs with backs shaped like imposing architectural forms, represent the kind of powerful individuals who would address the press at such an event symbolising their ambitions as ‘builders’ - who perpetuate wars for economic gain. The specific number of chairs is also a reference to Leonard Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and a reminder of the frequent role played by religion in the culture of war. White Builders and the Red Carpets is also a commentary on the distribution of information, and how crucial it may be for survival in the new media era where numerous 24 hour news channels operate where once there was scant distribution and access to such media.
Rebecca Morrild
courtesy:heartmus
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Artville Artist Of The Day Seema Kohli Untitled Mix Media on Canvas with 24 kt. gold & silver leaf Seema Kohli's works reveal a claiming of feminine subjectivities, an altered concept of feminine sexuality. Her works bring into focus a woman's physical attributes, her intellect, thought, dreams and realities. There is a celebration of beauty, sensuality and intimacy in her art.
Seema's most recent thematic engagement has been that of the 'Hiranyagarbha', that evolved from a mantra of the Yajur Veda, reflecting the quiet and subtle beauty of constant procreation. All the works are a prayer to the eternal self - a way of meditation. These works are spiritual but not religious, exploring with them, a poetically elegant and richly sensuous female form.
The 'Golden Womb' is a celebration through which the supremacy of a female is established and how she procreates and keeps the journey of life, forever on. Her work is symbolic of the progress and recycling of thought processes in the human mind, which is portrayed as calmer, more mature and serene both in terms of the palette and the form. All her works are a gesture of the divine, a prayer to the eternal self, a way of meditation.
Her work validates in different mediums in the past eighteen years, some constant, being the search for the self, while other being an extension of her conceptual and creative growth as an artist and she works in both small and large formats with layers of drawings and colors. Seema has recently been facilitated by Lalit Kala Akademi for being an achiever as a woman in Contemporary Indian Art.
courtesy:saffronart
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Artville Artist Of The Day
S.G.Vasudev
Tittle: Humanscape
Size: 79 x 92 cms
Year:1992
In his Cholamandal years, Vasudev lived close to the sea. There was the continual ebb and flow of the sound of the waves beating against sands, the hush of the Casuarina trees, filtering the strong winds through their needle-like leaves, and the scratch of crab-like forms moving across the hard dry crust of the beach. The house was filled with the deep bull-frog like voices of Carnatic maestros, just as the hammers and chisels pounded on the surfaces of the various metal plates and round brass vessels, trays and copper murals that Vasudev and Arnawaz, his artist wife at that time, created as part of the craft making activities that were an integral part of the Cholamandal Artists Village scheme. The idea was to produce an attractive, and at that time, innovative range of crafts, that would free the artists to experiment with their artistic vision, without fear of economic constraints. It was a time, when there was little, or no support at all, from the tradition bound public at Madras, for contemporary art.
The importance of being part of a vibrant artistic community that Cholamandal used to be in the 60s cannot be emphasized enough. It was a meeting place for artists, dramatists, dancers, drop-outs, poets, photographers, architects, anarchists and thinkers. Some of them have remained life long friends and partners in Vasudev's artistic journey . Whether it was designing a set for afilm , like Samskara, or Vamsa Vriksha, or much later the masks for a production of Hayavadana, written by Girish Karnad, or a series of line drawings inspired by the poems of A.K. Ramanujan, Vasudev's links with intellectual world, outside that of painting, or the visual arts, has remained a constant source of inspiration.
"I was deeply influenced by D. R. Bendre's poem, "Kalpa Vriksha Vrindavana," he says. "From then on I started reading some of the eminent Kannada writers and it's something that I have kept in touch with , one way or another, doing the book jackets for some of these writers. A.K. Ramanujan, Girish Karnad, Ananthamurthy, all these people used to come to Cholamandal. From Yayayti, I developed an interest inIndian myths and legends, which started appearing in my work. But it was the idea of the Vriksha, the Tree of Life, that slowly started becoming very important to me. It was a powerful concept that has been visualized in almost every other culture that you can think of, in some way or another. Even an artist like Mondarin was inspired by looking at the branches of a tree."
"In the 80s I developed my own "Tree of Life." To me it symbolizes sexuality, fertility, procreation, as well as our links with our past, its myths and legends, the branches spreading out into the future," says Vasudev. It was in every sense a fertile period.
The Vriksha has been central to Vasudev's artistic vision. It's gone through many mutations, becoming the "Tree of Life and Death" in the late 80s when Arnawaz passed away after a long illness. After a lean period, during his return to his native Bangalore, Vasudev resumed his work, with renewed vigour, with a series of line drawings, based on the theme of erotic love between a man and a woman, that gradually evolved into the more formal encounters that he called the "He" and "She" paintings that he did in the early 90s. Was the Vriksha finally letting go of him?
Before we answer this question it is instructive to go back to the technical changes that have accompanied Vasudev's artistic journey. In the early years of the Vriksha series, the canvas was thickly encrusted with swirls of paint, as if the tree itself were growing out of the canvas. The sensuous physical joy of building up the image on the canvas seemed to be the reflection of the reverse process that Vasudev used on his metal reliefs. Here the hard outlines would be incised in the metal, but in such a way as tom create raised wavy ridges and lines, in the midst of which would appear the dots, the striations, the cross-hatchings, the small leaf like forms, filled with all manner of granular indentations. Later on the surfaces would also be enameled. Ther is nothing that satisfies the Indian artistic sense more than surface decoration. Vasudev discovered this in his metal works. It influenced his large oil paintings no less, which despite its compositional clarity, is filled with passionate delight in decorative effects.
He also discovered the dramatic power of words, not only in the vibrant themes that friends like Karnad were beginning to unfold on the stage, using English dialogue, quite naturally mixed with classical Carnatic music and folk songs, but as an artistic motif in his own work. K.C.S. Paniker, the charismatic principal of the College of Arts and Crafts at Madras, had signaled the way to the use of Indian scripts, much as they had always been included on the murals along the temple walls, or on scrolls and cloth paintings. The rounded Southern scripts now became another source of artistic exploration. They appear in much of Vasudev's curling artistic vocabulary, sometimes in a corner, like the stylized clouds in a Chinese painting, or patterning a small patch of bed-cover, on which the main figures are just as closely entwined, in the manner of a Japanese wood-cut, or drifting in barely noticeable swirls across the monochromatic background of a large oil painting. One would like to think that the small lively monkey like forms that tumble out of his trees, at one point of time, or peer through the crevices of his drawings , are the round Kannada script that have found a life of their own.
At the same time, Vasudev was also moving away from the impasto effect of his earlier method of painting, which he found too laborious and time consuming. Instead, he devised a way in which he could suggest the same effect, by using less paint, but by combining a thin dark painted outline, with light feathery brush-strokes, that created the same effect.
The South Indian emphasis on a strong drawing line that invisibly surrounds the envelope that we call life, is an integral part of its artistic tradition.
This has been Vasudev's choice, to play with the line and make it his own. When he embarks on his drawings, the line is in full control. In his latest set of drawings, done in silver tipped ink on black, one can see his recent concerns for the environment and its abuse by mankind, expressed in a child-like manner that does not destroy the hope that something may yet be done. In his paintings, however, the pressure of using the line to define his images is less, as he allows himself the freedom to allow his brush to take charge, as it were, freeing the imagination to suggest the larger issues that currently agitate his mind. Agitate is perhaps the wrong word, for no matter how involved Vasudev might be in certain issues, the final effect on his canvas is to find them rendered in a state of equilibrium , almost up-lifted in the brilliant glow of his palette, now become darker, more mysterious , but always luminous with its suggestion of ocean blues, aquamarines and iridescent greens. "I never consciously use colour'" he says. "The painting dictates the particular mood or texture that I might want to convey at that moment."
In his latest phase the habits of a lifetime are being abandoned. The centrality of his subject matter, the tree or floating body, or head, is now abandoned for a more free flowing composition.
courtesy:saffronart
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Artville Artist Of The Day Gulam Mohammed SheikhTittle: Between Memory and Music "Passages" SeriesYear: 1991Medium: Oil on canvassize: 42" x 84"
"You would never paint a religious picture in the secular and liberal atmosphere of an art school. You would never paint anything that you believed in. Someone should really work on how many themes artists deal with. They will find there are very few fit subjects for art."
Painter, art historian, and writer Gulam Mohammed Sheikh taught art history and painting for nearly three decades at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. He has edited a book on 'Contemporary Art in Baroda' that traces the evolution of Baroda as an important center of contemporary art and art education from the nineteenth century up to the last decade of the twentieth century.
The literary sensibility of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh is as fine as his artistic sensibility, for he is also a distinguished Gujarati poet. Says he, " There is a very meaningful relationship between writing and painting. Our painting tradition has been suffused with it. But now we have developed a purist's mode where we have separated the two. This is like saying that when you see you should shut your ears, while you hear you should shut your eyes. You don't. You can't. Those who have studied perception will realize the correlation between the senses."
Sheikh paints on formats ranging from hand-held paper to architectural scale, to bring the world he knows, sees and seeks, into his life; to illumine it in its complexities and contradictions, reinventing art history while painting.
"Occasionally, I place an image upon another image to depict a journey of the spirit on the landscape of the face. There is mysticism and, at the same time, the device of reversal is used in an almost surrealist mode, quizzical and explosive," he says. The idea of a dialogue has been a very central one in his work and this idea imparts a dynamic quality to his works.
The impressions, especially of the early years of life, the tales he heard and the myths he grew up with, found expression as images in poetry first, and later, in painting.
But where his paintings are concerned, Kabir (the legendary poet / saint) has always been his source of inspiration, right from his schooldays. As the artist himself says, "Kabir has been a seminal figure from the period in which he lived up to the present day. People live with his thoughts and words ... he was not a preacher and spoke against sects. If people have made a sect out of Kabir, it is not of his making."
Over the years the theme of Kabir kept returning to him and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh created a relationship between his own images and Kabir's words. He has worked on the 'Alphabet Series' based on his relationship with Kabir.
Years ago Sheikh's paintings used to have a labyrinth like spaces. Now all his characters are not so much connected in a dreamscape as inscribed in or mapped on a body. Now he paints to stir people out of their cocoons and his obsession with Kabir remains because he thinks that we on earth need an icon, especially now that violence is so much a part of our daily lives.
It has often been said of him that he has been influenced by other artists' works. He responds to this and explains his repeated reference to Kabir saying, "If you respond to something, if you have liked it or loved it, it's because the space for that is already existent within you, which is waiting to be filled. But when I invoke an artist's painting, it is a different painting that recurs to me. It has to be inscribed by me, in my memory and my subjectivity. And that's what inspires me to create something new."
courtesy:saffronart
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Artville Artist Of The Day
T M Azis
Untitled
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 30 x 22"
"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.
Azis presently lives and works in Bangalore.
courtesy:saffronart
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