SALT OF MY MIND

                                                                                                                      Rue Transnoniuan, 1834                                One of his few realistic works, showing the massacre by the French Government                                                              (Source - The British Museum) Every once in a rare while we come across an artist who just draws us in, very inexplicably yet in a very natural manner. As I stood staring for hours at Daumier's works at the Royal Academy some months ago, I knew I was in that rare sphere of time; of having discovered something so very precious and brilliant, something which would help me tackle some of my persistent questions and yet something so simple and lucid that it wouldn't be a hard brick on the head. At first you are just swept off your feet; you just stare at the genius in front of you. You can never have enough of his drawings (and there are over 1000's of which o

One thing which when knocks against my mind makes music to my senses is the feel of a kinship between Art and me. It is tough to have an objective understanding of your own work without getting your feet tangled in value judgements; nevertheless, it is pretty interesting to pause for a while and look back at snippets of your journey and mull over what else you could do to develop your Art. An Art residency is always such a place. It is like a low tide in your creative cruise; you think, but are stopped before your thinking can step into worry; you work but you don't drive yourself nuts, and you are made to feel safe and secure enough to have all those ideas until now hibernating in your head to be finally born, however deformed or premature it might later seem. Some residencies are more like personal spaces to be cut away from everything else and work; some residencies are pretty intense if there are specific programs or shows to be put up by the end, and you have daily excitin

                                One of those things that make you feel proud and contented! After an absolutely intense year and an even more vehement couple of weeks finalizing and installing the main work for the degree show, my mind felt empty and spent for a long time after that. It was a big adventure; not just working with multidimensionality in a single work and trying to combine two mediums (performance and Visual art), but doing it in such a way that it did not seem forced and could justify the concept I was wanting to express. MID LIGHT, A mixed media installation of found objects, Sculptures, Drawings, and Videos, was inspired by the contrast of eternity in the creation (Orlando novel) and the mortality of the creator (Virginia Woolf's suicide). Not intended to be just an illustration of the novel or Virginia Woolf's personality/character, I dissolved it enough to allow my own interpretation to be visible as well, and the whole installation became more of a

The Indian Classical art field is a great pioneer of selflessness, the dissolving of the ‘self’ and the ‘ego’ to be able to create and share art in a pure manner, whether music or dance. But as an artist progresses on the path of time, there does come a point where, after having sufficiently been obedient and trying to dissolve the ‘I’, the ‘I’ is the only thing that looms large as a question mark. It is a strange paradox; and without that ‘I’, there seems to be no path further which could probably lead to an ‘I’ lessness. Scott McCloud is one of the new Gods I have discovered in the haven of art, through his brilliant book ‘Understanding Comics – the invisible art’.   There I discovered what had been missing in my Bharathanatyam journey. McCloud, though talking essentially of comics, does touch on various things which are common to all art forms. One of them was the 6 step path – a path which every artist, either consciously or unconsciously, and not necessarily in the same

It was not until the summer of 2012 during a residency in New York that I, as an Art student, had the wonderful fortune of drawing from life. We had a live model who posed nude for us, twice a week.  After that first life drawing experience of having gone through hopeless frustration at not being able to gauge the life in front of me to fairly good progressions in later drawings, it sunk in to me that I had been through 5 years of undergrad without a single nude life drawing class. In fact, we only ever had older men and women model for us, decked in turbans and layers of  sari . It would have been good if it had been a part of the study, and not the concentrated whole. What is this stigma against nude modeling for art in India? Or is it only in my imagination? But if it is, then why did we not have a SINGLE such study in 5 whole years? When I took a few more classes in London, I  couldn't  help observing, during the breaks, how the students were  careful not to take photogra

UNDISSOLVED THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE                                                                                              “…Here, no here makes sense… presence and absence battle at the core of its every word, with absence winning out.’ (E.J. la Demeure et le livre’, Mercure de France – Gabriel Bounoure – quoted in ‘The Book of Margins’- Edmund Jabes, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop .)                                                                            CONTENTS ABSTRACT                                                                                                                      PROLOGUE                                                                                                  ACT I – The Presence of Absence                           ACT II – On The Threshold                                                     Paintings and Drawings                                                            Abstraction of Ballet chara