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ETCHING AN ANCIENT SKY

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The earth has no outline. Water is without margins. Trees are without solid contours.  Perhaps it might have overwhelmed us to consume Nature’s bounty in all its edgeless joys; and therefore, our eyes have been made so as to give a periphery to whatever we see in front of us. We frame compositions, a hundred a day almost involuntarily, as we skim past the things that happen to cross our vision. This subtle flair is what visual artists hone so diligently - to carefully choose every composition, every element that would form a part of a painting. For landscape painters, it is an unspoken challenge to stand almost equal to Nature; to lend its vast freedom a frame to rest within.   The day I take the train from London to Manningtree to begin my walk around Constable country, the beloved place of 18 th  century landscape painter John Constable (and many others), I am quite enthusiastic about the goals of my travel. But strangely, my mind is almost void of thoughts. It is only days later, wh
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Review of the poetry pamphlet 'Bulbul Calling' by Pratyusha

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Pratyusha’s pamphlet ‘Bulbul Calling’ published by Bitter melon Press, is at once a dense and a fluid reading where emotions carve out a translucent space, reminiscent of the portrayal of Nature often evoked in the poems. It reiterates the magnificent power of words when used with perceptive control to breathe life into fresh, unusual imagery.   This pamphlet brings to life the poet’s main absorptions – nuances of mythology, familial emotions, history, Nature, and language itself, and she succeeds superbly in most cases. The usage of Urdu and Tamil words – which make themselves an integral part of the work right from the cover art - strike not as forced inclusion for the sake of inclusion, but as a natural path to an honest emotive display. There has been considerable debate about italicising or hyphenating words of other languages used in a largely English text; is it ‘othering’ the language? The annoyingly simple answer is that it depends on the intention of the writer and the charac
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SETSUKO ONO                                    Solo Exhibition Daiwa Foundation Japan House, London 16 th  February 2018 – 9 th  March 2018 Written by Anvi                         A large mixed media scroll titled ‘Resistance to overwhelming force’ that portrays figures and forms in various states of defiance along with candid echoes of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is spread out gravely across adjacent walls. A few meters across, a wooden sculpture titled ‘Victory’ rises up headless and unabashed from a plinth with its arched back capturing a moment of ecstatic release. This seamless meandering between contrasts and antonyms occurs organically in the works; both in the use of materials and the subject matter. The serious and the playful, the political and the personal, the deep and the lighthearted, the realistic and the abstract - all strike a languid equilibrium in the visual language, and that sets the pulse of Setsuko San’s very first exhibition in London. This invisible undulating rhyth
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'The Last Supper' - Exhibition review

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‘What is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would.’ These words from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland weirdly strike you long after you have seen this exhibition. Before, though, you are oblivious in your presumptions. ‘Christ!’ You murmur under your breath, partly because of the vapors of the humid day and partly because you subconsciously guess everything that you are about to encounter. NGMA Bangalore in collaboration with the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata has the self-taught Indian artist Madhvi Parekh’s ‘The Last Supper’ on show, which is inspired mainly by Leonardo Da Vinci’s namesake and is a collection of Biblical tales rendered as reverse paintings on acrylic sheets. You nonchalantly recollect all the ‘last’ suppers you have seen, and apprehend exactly what you will witness as you step in to the gallery. But just as unexpectedly as Alice falls down the rabbit hole, you plummet into an emotional wonderland. The assumptions quickly cr
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Into the essence

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Into The Essence  What would it have been like if Virginia Woolf had been a dancer instead ? What would her words and ideas have looked like as movements ? I have long been possessed by these kind of thoughts, these sorts of unending contemplation. How does the 'idea' or the concept evolve and unfold in different art forms? Each Art form, with its technicalities and specific beauty, is (according to me) in the end a medium which communicates the idea, the emotion, or the concept. Whether the idea is a traditional/mythological/inherited one, or a (supposedly) original, it is still, to me as an artist, the essence of art. A figure painted a bluish tint, standing with legs crossed with a flute in the hands, is undeniably Krishna. Any (Indian) dancer that imitates this body language/gesture, is undoubtedly showing Krishna. Is not the dance an image here? Or the image the dance? With words, the particular combination of the seven letters 'Krishna' is, well,
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'SOUNDSCAPES' at the National Gallery

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Paul Cezanne - Les Grande Baigneuse One of the most essential and philosophical things that art does, however cautiously or however strongly, is an inquiry into the concepts of time and space as what it is and what else it could be. Different mediums of Art do this in different ways. But what happens when two forms get together, not just for the sake of getting together, but as a response to each other and a form of communication with each other? The results can be as perplexing and mysterious as it was at the 'Soundscapes' exhibition at the National Gallery. As soon as you enter the exhibition arena, you are shown an introductory film in which the commissioned musicians talk about how they were inspired by the particular pieces they have chosen (It might have been better if the film was shown after the audience went through the soundproofed labyrinth and taken in the works without a prelude into the ideas of what/why they were what they were). After this you are l
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'Elite Intervals' - Pauses and ponderings

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What do you do when the last line has been drawn and the final brush stroke has dusted the pastel powder in its final place? Sigh! What an amazing space it is; a calm satisfaction, a bubbling joy and a sense of being in the blank. (Until you start to analyze your work critically few hours later and bury your head in white sheets again!). Of late I have been thinking about these spaces - these 'pauses' that occur between each work, these halts which are more or less resting places for the mind. Painting affords me that space more; unlike dance, where I need to be in class or on stage irrespective of my 'mood' or my 'inspiration', the solitary nature of painting affords me the luxury of a little laziness and prolonged pondering during the process. In fact the new series 'Elite Intervals' is about these pauses - something that is not over yet but has halted, looking left and right to seek out newer inspirations to whet its hunger. The series visually
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