Friday, December 26, 2008
on a publisher's table
On this fine morning
A Publisher has a poem on his table
He also has two of his cheques bounced
And hundreds of others left blank and due
For those failed writers.
Still he is having a happy breakfast with birds.
And with reason!
Just paid back his nine months' dues to the printer
Far away in Tamilnadu.
Looking so sharp and beautiful,
The poem on his table, an ordinary one,
never had expected the publisher to take a look at it.
But it could see through a veil of its own stiffening rhyme
The deadly investment of a mad woman's time
Suddenly the publisher brainstormed
With that romantic old poet's lines
Yes, that too with reason!
Those scholarly fathers of the country
Once had taught us those lines like scriptures and reforms, you know
He thought to reprint the virtuous old poet,
That's doing a classic job!
But that's in vain, reported those grandsons when contacted.
Their romantic grandfather had already given the sole rights
To the best available sales man at door, in his very own poetic lifetime.
Looking so sharp and beautiful,
The poem on publisher's table,
But it could smell in his briefings,
The deserted sigh of a language
The publisher these days does not talk to his wife
Or teach his son any arithmetic
But waits for a poem to fill their gap
He doesn't publish his photo
But dreams to own a newspaper to advertise him
Looking so sharp and beautiful,
Poem on his table,
But it could taste the publisher's happy meals,
illustrated with plenty of pictures
And there he sits filling all post-dated cheques
with hellish confidence in his 'exotic cookery' series.
At last with a thump in heart
the publisher touches the poem on his table.
It looks so lovely to him
He licks it with love
He bloats its poetic buds with a move
And drops his hot tears on the best of all its stanzas
Who knows?
Poetry was the woman he loved most in life.
Courier
'Ustad Bismilla Khan' sent me a courier.
It was the latest grown yam in his courtyard.
He plucked it
washed its dirt off
On a restless morning
Enclosed in hardboard boxes
One inside the other
Covered further in newspaper
Pasted all ends with cello tape,
Again
Covered in a bigger box
Addressed to my name,
Scribbled with mobile number
As if from a concert
He got up content within.
By chance,
there is an axe-mark on the yam
It watered itself in strange pink
And my wet palm here
Is so scratching with an unknown pain
Till it reaches here.
At last
On a lonely day
It reached to me.
Having washed off its dirt again,
Yes. Just out of a habit,
Kept among handsomely other yams
Tomatoes and drumsticks in my fridge
Taken out as if nothing happened
I made a delicious yam fry.
How painful was life for me, you know?
I'm fed up of this 'Ustad Bismilla Khan'.
It was the latest grown yam in his courtyard.
He plucked it
washed its dirt off
On a restless morning
Enclosed in hardboard boxes
One inside the other
Covered further in newspaper
Pasted all ends with cello tape,
Again
Covered in a bigger box
Addressed to my name,
Scribbled with mobile number
As if from a concert
He got up content within.
By chance,
there is an axe-mark on the yam
It watered itself in strange pink
And my wet palm here
Is so scratching with an unknown pain
Till it reaches here.
At last
On a lonely day
It reached to me.
Having washed off its dirt again,
Yes. Just out of a habit,
Kept among handsomely other yams
Tomatoes and drumsticks in my fridge
Taken out as if nothing happened
I made a delicious yam fry.
How painful was life for me, you know?
I'm fed up of this 'Ustad Bismilla Khan'.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Men with eyes and cameras
Once there was a lovely man and a girl
They met everyday on the riverside
in those lonely tunnels.
Man planted an eye on the girl each day
Man’s eyes, you know
Fell like rose apples on her nipples
What a heaven!
Each eye opened at the other end of it to her
A world so cumbersome
For her little nipples, but
Eyes fell on forehead
On nose tips
On lips and necks
On fingers and navels
On the tip of her mind so sprouting
All the time they were disturbed by men with camera
Who suspected life in the lonely tunnel
Men with camera always told stories
But they never gave the girl an eye, even for fun sake
She couldn’t wander across mountains and see
The strangely bitten moon in the sky
Men with camera informed the world
That here is a girl in unwanted shape
She simply borrowed eyes from lovely man
And she is looking back at the world and cursing
In fact men with camera didn’t know her language
From the lonely tunnels
Men with camera reported:
At last the terror is over.
The girl is blind, with a lovely man’s eyes on her nipples.
They met everyday on the riverside
in those lonely tunnels.
Man planted an eye on the girl each day
Man’s eyes, you know
Fell like rose apples on her nipples
What a heaven!
Each eye opened at the other end of it to her
A world so cumbersome
For her little nipples, but
Eyes fell on forehead
On nose tips
On lips and necks
On fingers and navels
On the tip of her mind so sprouting
All the time they were disturbed by men with camera
Who suspected life in the lonely tunnel
Men with camera always told stories
But they never gave the girl an eye, even for fun sake
She couldn’t wander across mountains and see
The strangely bitten moon in the sky
Men with camera informed the world
That here is a girl in unwanted shape
She simply borrowed eyes from lovely man
And she is looking back at the world and cursing
In fact men with camera didn’t know her language
From the lonely tunnels
Men with camera reported:
At last the terror is over.
The girl is blind, with a lovely man’s eyes on her nipples.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
red to eat
red abrus
red abrus
scattered on your face
as if on pale seashore
on a sunny day!
Is it, nice young man ?
look, a red abrus today
a red abrus but
its only brewing
so crimson
on the tip of my nose
let its face come out
will you eat it like a sumptuous meal?
red abrus
scattered on your face
as if on pale seashore
on a sunny day!
Is it, nice young man ?
look, a red abrus today
a red abrus but
its only brewing
so crimson
on the tip of my nose
let its face come out
will you eat it like a sumptuous meal?
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
the watercolour of blank moments
i did this work sitting in the verandhah of a rented house where i lived with dear rajesh and son adityan as a 2 year old one. the little son was sleeping and it was around 3 o clock getting evening...i was feeling lonely. i was simply blank about fleeting moments and the food i was making.....i never thought then that life would move further in any way i wanted it to.....before making tea i made this small watercolour..birds were singing and plantain leaves afresh after a rain when the sun brightened a little
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
who will love artists with due share of dignity?
when do we artists think in terms wider than our reality? all artists away from the hot contemporary locations and thematics of war, machine and media have to give a thought to it with more of a will power...
the sources of global art world tell any artist at locations with lesser pedigree of art culture - " Phu, do it contemporary, man"
but how and when does one acquire perceptions of the 'contemporary'?
it is --- when one occurs on a new image? when one goes new places? when one finds somebody saying 'i like your work, please give it to me for this sum of money? when an international critic adds one's name in a list of artists in his article? when one participates in a show at hot hubs of art ? when one sees strange works in internet of unknown people in unknown galleries at far away places? when one experiences poverty, that pennyless state of affairs in pocket? when one gets more money than he / she could have dreamed of? when one is indulging in a love of all affairs around?
for an artist to think wider than immediate reality has many means and reasons.
yesterday i met a young man who does strange sketches of ordinary lives. they are truly contemporary for any land devastated and ruined by wars and middle men. like kashmir or iraq or afghan or palastine.....somehow he lives in north kerala, in a fairly scenic land but of moderate profile except in possibly tourism industry.
he is an illustrator in malayalam weeklies for a living or for something less than a living. he is not popular for the ordinary sense of the term. but he is loved by many readers of fiction in malayalam. he has worked with some writers who try doing strange pictorial stuff. he worked with ordinary writers too, because afterall that is an illustrator's job. but ofcourse he believes that he made a better living when he was working in his brother's chappal production unit for some time when he was a student.
today he has come to this town thrissur to meet a writer who might buy his painting with some dignity. we simply shared seeing the works of Amy Cutler and Marcel D'zama in my collection. he came with a friend and they left for their prospective buyer living nearby.
there are many writers and intellectuals around, mostly high-salaried class who speak with passion for artist's works (many artists have got accolades similar, for that matter) but when it comes to buy and help him in reality with that damn thing called money, most of them shy away and speak of many other stuff under the sun and have a tea together and depart for the day from any possible cross roads of life. and it is difficult to deal with 'money men' who might help also. most of them simply go for perceptions where it is often difficult for an ordinary person to trim and prune to those fantasies.
artists are not loved for the reasons of reality...
they are loved simply for the reasons of fantasy.....
but an artist like anybody else, has a tummy, wife, kid, family and other things that create problems when he simply thinks 'contemporary' terms 'wider than his reality'.
the sources of global art world tell any artist at locations with lesser pedigree of art culture - " Phu, do it contemporary, man"
but how and when does one acquire perceptions of the 'contemporary'?
it is --- when one occurs on a new image? when one goes new places? when one finds somebody saying 'i like your work, please give it to me for this sum of money? when an international critic adds one's name in a list of artists in his article? when one participates in a show at hot hubs of art ? when one sees strange works in internet of unknown people in unknown galleries at far away places? when one experiences poverty, that pennyless state of affairs in pocket? when one gets more money than he / she could have dreamed of? when one is indulging in a love of all affairs around?
for an artist to think wider than immediate reality has many means and reasons.
yesterday i met a young man who does strange sketches of ordinary lives. they are truly contemporary for any land devastated and ruined by wars and middle men. like kashmir or iraq or afghan or palastine.....somehow he lives in north kerala, in a fairly scenic land but of moderate profile except in possibly tourism industry.
he is an illustrator in malayalam weeklies for a living or for something less than a living. he is not popular for the ordinary sense of the term. but he is loved by many readers of fiction in malayalam. he has worked with some writers who try doing strange pictorial stuff. he worked with ordinary writers too, because afterall that is an illustrator's job. but ofcourse he believes that he made a better living when he was working in his brother's chappal production unit for some time when he was a student.
today he has come to this town thrissur to meet a writer who might buy his painting with some dignity. we simply shared seeing the works of Amy Cutler and Marcel D'zama in my collection. he came with a friend and they left for their prospective buyer living nearby.
there are many writers and intellectuals around, mostly high-salaried class who speak with passion for artist's works (many artists have got accolades similar, for that matter) but when it comes to buy and help him in reality with that damn thing called money, most of them shy away and speak of many other stuff under the sun and have a tea together and depart for the day from any possible cross roads of life. and it is difficult to deal with 'money men' who might help also. most of them simply go for perceptions where it is often difficult for an ordinary person to trim and prune to those fantasies.
artists are not loved for the reasons of reality...
they are loved simply for the reasons of fantasy.....
but an artist like anybody else, has a tummy, wife, kid, family and other things that create problems when he simply thinks 'contemporary' terms 'wider than his reality'.
Ha!
പ൪വ്വതഘട്ടങല്ക്കിടയില് ചിതറിയിട്ട മുത്തുമണികല്
ആകെത്തിളങുന്ന രാത്രി
മധുരമുള്ള ഒരു കഷ്ണം കാഴ്ച
നുറുങിപ്പോകുന്നു
മഹാമേരുക്കല്
ഒന്നിനു പിറകെ ഒന്നായീ
പീന്നാക്കം പോകുന്നു
ഹയ്വേ മാ൯ , ഏവീടേയാണ് നീ
ഞാ൯ തയ്യാറായീരീക്കുന്നു ആകെ പതീഞ സ്വരത്തില്
ആകെത്തിളങുന്ന രാത്രി
മധുരമുള്ള ഒരു കഷ്ണം കാഴ്ച
നുറുങിപ്പോകുന്നു
മഹാമേരുക്കല്
ഒന്നിനു പിറകെ ഒന്നായീ
പീന്നാക്കം പോകുന്നു
ഹയ്വേ മാ൯ , ഏവീടേയാണ് നീ
ഞാ൯ തയ്യാറായീരീക്കുന്നു ആകെ പതീഞ സ്വരത്തില്
Saturday, October 11, 2008
the discreet charm of a HARTAL day
അടക്കം
തൊട്ടതെല്ലാം തീയാക്കുന്നവരുടെ നാട്ടില്
ഒരുത്തനു പെട്ടെന്നു തുമ്മാ൯ മുട്ടി
എന്നാ പിന്നെ തുമ്മിക്കൂടേ,യെന്നുചോദിക്കരുത്,
മൂക്ക് തെറിച്ചാലോ ?
തെറിച്ചു വീഴുന്ന മൂക്കുകള്
ഹ൪ത്താലെടുത്ത വഴിവക്കുകളില്കുടുങി മരിക്കും
എങോട്ടെന്നില്ലാതെ
അതിരാവിലെ മീ൯ കുട്ടയും കൊണ്ട്
പിടഞോടുന്ന തങ്കം തടഞു വീഴും
പാല്ക്കാര൯, പത്രക്കാര൯അയയ്പ്പ൯,പിന്നെ
നട്ടുച്ചക്കു കൊമ്പ് വിളിച്ചോടുന്നആംമ്പുല൯സ്
ഒക്കെയും പാളി പോകുംവൈകീട്ടത്തെ എക്സിക്യൂട്ടീവും
പോയ് പോകും,പിന്നെഅവശേഷിച്ച ജീവനക്കാറ്ക്കും ജീവ൯ മുട്ടും
പ്രതീകങള് കൊണ്ട് സംസാരിക്കുന്നവരുടെ
പ്രബുദധമായ രാജ്യത്ത് ജീവിച്ച് കൊണ്ട്
നിങളിങനെ തുമ്മരുത്
ഇവിടെ എല്ലാം പെട്ടെന്നു തീ പിടിക്കും
അതാ
തെറിച്ച് വീണ ഒടുവിലത്തെ മൂക്കും പേറി
ലോറികള് യാത്രയാവുന്നു
എവിടേയും ചോ൪ത്തിക്കളയാനാവാതെ
അളിഞ മൂക്കുകളള്ഇങോട്ട്
തിരിച്ചെത്താതിരിക്കട്ടെയെന്ന്
നമുക്കൊരുമിച്ച് പ്രാ൪ത്ഥിക്കാം.
ഒന്നുണ്ട് സുഹ്രുത്തെ,
നമ്മളിങനെ തുമ്മാതിരിക്കുന്നത്ലോകത്തല് വച്ചേറ്റവും വിശിഷ്ട്മായജനാധിപത്യ ബോധം കൊണ്ടാണ്.
translation of this poem was kindly forwarded by friend Dr. C S Venkiteswaran:
The Discreet Charm of a Hartal Day
In a land where everyone is capable
Of inflaming anything they touch
One person was about to sneeze..
Don't (Never) ask,
why don't you then just sneeze,What if one's nose flies off?
Noses thus thrown off
Would then die smothered
At the roadsides, afflicted by hartal
Thangam rushing off to nowhere
Early in the morning
With fish basket atop her head
Would stumble on it and fall
The milk man, the newspaper boy and Ayyappan,
The ambulance that bugles its way past at noon
All would slip off-track
The evening 'Executive' Would also depart
And then, even the remaining staff
Would start suffocating
In this enlightened land
Where people talk with symbols
Don't sneeze like this
HereEverything is easily inflammable
Here goes the truck
Carrying the last nose
That flew off
Let us all pray together
That those putrid noses
That couldn't be let off anywhere
Would never return
One thing, friend
If at all we desist from sneezing
It is because of our democratic sense
One that is greatest in the world
തൊട്ടതെല്ലാം തീയാക്കുന്നവരുടെ നാട്ടില്
ഒരുത്തനു പെട്ടെന്നു തുമ്മാ൯ മുട്ടി
എന്നാ പിന്നെ തുമ്മിക്കൂടേ,യെന്നുചോദിക്കരുത്,
മൂക്ക് തെറിച്ചാലോ ?
തെറിച്ചു വീഴുന്ന മൂക്കുകള്
ഹ൪ത്താലെടുത്ത വഴിവക്കുകളില്കുടുങി മരിക്കും
എങോട്ടെന്നില്ലാതെ
അതിരാവിലെ മീ൯ കുട്ടയും കൊണ്ട്
പിടഞോടുന്ന തങ്കം തടഞു വീഴും
പാല്ക്കാര൯, പത്രക്കാര൯അയയ്പ്പ൯,പിന്നെ
നട്ടുച്ചക്കു കൊമ്പ് വിളിച്ചോടുന്നആംമ്പുല൯സ്
ഒക്കെയും പാളി പോകുംവൈകീട്ടത്തെ എക്സിക്യൂട്ടീവും
പോയ് പോകും,പിന്നെഅവശേഷിച്ച ജീവനക്കാറ്ക്കും ജീവ൯ മുട്ടും
പ്രതീകങള് കൊണ്ട് സംസാരിക്കുന്നവരുടെ
പ്രബുദധമായ രാജ്യത്ത് ജീവിച്ച് കൊണ്ട്
നിങളിങനെ തുമ്മരുത്
ഇവിടെ എല്ലാം പെട്ടെന്നു തീ പിടിക്കും
അതാ
തെറിച്ച് വീണ ഒടുവിലത്തെ മൂക്കും പേറി
ലോറികള് യാത്രയാവുന്നു
എവിടേയും ചോ൪ത്തിക്കളയാനാവാതെ
അളിഞ മൂക്കുകളള്ഇങോട്ട്
തിരിച്ചെത്താതിരിക്കട്ടെയെന്ന്
നമുക്കൊരുമിച്ച് പ്രാ൪ത്ഥിക്കാം.
ഒന്നുണ്ട് സുഹ്രുത്തെ,
നമ്മളിങനെ തുമ്മാതിരിക്കുന്നത്ലോകത്തല് വച്ചേറ്റവും വിശിഷ്ട്മായജനാധിപത്യ ബോധം കൊണ്ടാണ്.
translation of this poem was kindly forwarded by friend Dr. C S Venkiteswaran:
The Discreet Charm of a Hartal Day
In a land where everyone is capable
Of inflaming anything they touch
One person was about to sneeze..
Don't (Never) ask,
why don't you then just sneeze,What if one's nose flies off?
Noses thus thrown off
Would then die smothered
At the roadsides, afflicted by hartal
Thangam rushing off to nowhere
Early in the morning
With fish basket atop her head
Would stumble on it and fall
The milk man, the newspaper boy and Ayyappan,
The ambulance that bugles its way past at noon
All would slip off-track
The evening 'Executive' Would also depart
And then, even the remaining staff
Would start suffocating
In this enlightened land
Where people talk with symbols
Don't sneeze like this
HereEverything is easily inflammable
Here goes the truck
Carrying the last nose
That flew off
Let us all pray together
That those putrid noses
That couldn't be let off anywhere
Would never return
One thing, friend
If at all we desist from sneezing
It is because of our democratic sense
One that is greatest in the world
flowering trees
പൊതിരെ പെയ്യുന്ന രാത്രികളില്എന്ത് ചെയ്യെണം ?
കുഞി൯ടെ ഗിത്താറെടുത്ത് മീട്ടണം
ലോകം കേട്ടീട്ടെയില്ലാത്ത ഓരോരൊ ഗീതങള്
മധുരം കയ്പ്പു ഛവ൪പ്പെന്നോരാതെ
ഒന്നൊന്നായി കമ്ബനം ചെയ്യിക്കണം
പെയ്തു വീഴുന്ന വെള്ളകെട്ടുകളില്
അപരിചിതരും അതീവ നഗ്നരുമായ മനുഷ്യ൪
ഹൃദയം പറിചെറിഞ് പാടുന്നതു കേള്ക്കാം
ഓരോ പെരുംതുള്ളിയും
ചുണ്ട് കൂ൪പ്പിച്ച്ഒരോ കുഞു മുയലായി
വന്നു പതിക്കും
അദ്റ്ശ്യമായ അവയുടെ കൊമ്പുകളില്നേ൪മയാല് പിടിചു തൂക്കിയെടുതുകണ്ണിനു നേരെ വക്കുക
പിന്നീടു കുഞി൯ടെ ഗിതാറീല്ഹ്ഋദയം പറിഞ് തുള വീണതി൯ടെഛായാപടങല് വരചു തീ൪ക്കുക
ചുറ്റും തീ പിടിച്ച പൂമരങല്ക്കും
പിന്നീടങോട്ട് വസന്തം തന്നെ !!
കുഞി൯ടെ ഗിത്താറെടുത്ത് മീട്ടണം
ലോകം കേട്ടീട്ടെയില്ലാത്ത ഓരോരൊ ഗീതങള്
മധുരം കയ്പ്പു ഛവ൪പ്പെന്നോരാതെ
ഒന്നൊന്നായി കമ്ബനം ചെയ്യിക്കണം
പെയ്തു വീഴുന്ന വെള്ളകെട്ടുകളില്
അപരിചിതരും അതീവ നഗ്നരുമായ മനുഷ്യ൪
ഹൃദയം പറിചെറിഞ് പാടുന്നതു കേള്ക്കാം
ഓരോ പെരുംതുള്ളിയും
ചുണ്ട് കൂ൪പ്പിച്ച്ഒരോ കുഞു മുയലായി
വന്നു പതിക്കും
അദ്റ്ശ്യമായ അവയുടെ കൊമ്പുകളില്നേ൪മയാല് പിടിചു തൂക്കിയെടുതുകണ്ണിനു നേരെ വക്കുക
പിന്നീടു കുഞി൯ടെ ഗിതാറീല്ഹ്ഋദയം പറിഞ് തുള വീണതി൯ടെഛായാപടങല് വരചു തീ൪ക്കുക
ചുറ്റും തീ പിടിച്ച പൂമരങല്ക്കും
പിന്നീടങോട്ട് വസന്തം തന്നെ !!
Monday, October 6, 2008
recent poems
എന്തുകൊണ്ട്?
വരയുടെ പക്ഷി പാടുകയും
പാട്ടിന്റെ ആ ഉറുമ്പ് അരിക്കുകയും
അരിക്കലിന്റ്റെ പാമ്പ് പുളക്കുകയും
പുളപ്പിന്റെ പൂവു മേയുകയും
മേയലിന്റെ ആ മൂത്രക്കുടിയന് പുഴു നോക്കുകയും
നോക്കലിന്റെ അട്ട പെരുകുകയും
പെരുല്കലിന്റെ പ്രാവു വിടരുകയും
വിടരലിന്റെ ചിലന്തി കടിച്ചിരിക്കുകയും
കടിച്ചിരിക്കലിന്റെ ഒച്ചു കുറുകുകയും
കുറുകലിന്റെ മത്സ്യം വല കെട്ടുകയും
വല നെയ്യലിന്റെ കുശവന് ഇഴയുകയും
ഇഴയലിന്റെ ആ കുടം, ഭയങ്കര കുടം പൊട്ടുകയ
ച്ചെയ്യുന്നതെന്തു? എന്തെന്തു?
ഹെന്റ്തു? പറയു?
ഇത്ര നേരം ചിന്തിക്കരുതു
നീയേറ്റം ലാളിക്കുമീ മുടിത്തുമ്പിലെ വെള്ളം
പരന്നു പരന്നു ഇതാ ഝടുതിയില്
ഞാന് പറഞഞതൊക്കെ മായ്ച്ചില്ലെ
നീയും ദൈവവും ഒരുപോലെയുണ്ടു
ക്രുത്യം മിടുക്കോടെ ചേരുംപടി ചേര്ക്കില്ല
ചേര്ത്താലൊ മാഞും പോകും
ചപ്ലി ചിപ്ലി
റോക്കറ്റ് പോണൂ റോക്കറ്റ്
അതില് പക്ഷി ഇടിച്ചാലോ, എന്തു സംഭവിക്കും
ശൂ ശൂ ശൂ ന്നു ഡെയ്സിയും പോണൂ
ഡെയ്സിയിങനെ പോകുംപോ
ള്വല്ല്യ വല്ല്യ ഐസുകട്ട്കളു
രുണ്ടുപെരണ്ടു വന്നു
പെരന്ഡുരുണ്ടു വന്നു
ഒരിട്യാ കൊടുത്താലോ
പൂവു ചമ്മ്ന്തിയാകും
പൂവിന്റെ ചമ്മന്തി കൂട്ടീട്ട്ഞാനിന്നു മാമുണ്ടോളാം.
അപ്പോ ആ പിങ്കൂണ്ടല്ലൊ
പിങ്കു തോക്കെടുത്താലോ
തോക്കെടുത്താല് വെടി വക്കും
വെടി വച്ചാ അമ്മ ചാവില്ലെ
പാവമാണീ ബേഡ്ബേഡിനു മരുന്നു കൊടുക്കാം
എന്റെ മരുന്നു വേണ്ടാഅതു ചര്ദ്ദിക്കും.
ഈ വിമാനം ഫ്ലൈ ചെയ്യുവോ
ഫ്ലൈ ചെയ്താ അതു പറ്ക്കില്ലേ
പറന്നാ എന്താണ്ടാവാ
അതു ചെറുതായി ചെറുതായി പോവില്ലേ
ഈ ട്രെയ്നിന്റെ പടത്തിലുസ്റ്റാറെന്തിനാ,
സ്റ്റാറെന്നു വച്ചാലുട്രൈന് പൊട്ടിത്തെറിച്ചൂന്നാ
അപ്പോന്താണ്ടാവാ, തീ വരുംതീ വന്നാ കംബാറ്ട്മെന്റിലു ഒരൊറ്റാളില്ലാണ്ടാവും
ഇങന്യാണോ അച്ചാ ക്രിക്ക്ക്റ്റ്, എനിക്കു വയ്യാ
അച്ചനു പൂവിന്റെ ചമ്മന്തി വേണോ
എനിക്കു അമ്മേടെ അമ്മിഞ വേണം
ഓസ്വാള്ഡ് ഇന്നും വന്നില്ല
ഹെന്രീം വന്നില്ല
ഓസ്വാള്ഡിനു എത്ര കയ്യുകളാ
എത്ര കാലുകളാ
ഓസ്വാല്ഡിന്റേതു എല്ലാം കയ്യുകളാണോ
അതോ കാലുകളോ പറയു
അമ്മേ മതിയായ്
അമ്മേ മതിയായ്
ഇനി എനിക്കു ബില്ഡിങ് ഉണ്ടാക്കണം
ചപ്ലി ചിപ്ലിയാക്കരുതു പറഞേക്കാം
ഒന്നു തൊടാന്
ഏറെപ്പറയാനുള്ള ഒരാള്
ഒന്നും മിണ്ടാതിരിക്കുന്നു
ഒന്നും മിണ്ടാനില്ലാത്ത ഒരാള്
ഒന്നും മിണ്ടാനില്ലാത്ത ഒരാള്
ഏറെപ്പറഞുംകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നു
അറിയാതെ നനഞുപോയ അടിവസത്റം കൊണ്ട്
എല്ലാരും അങിങു ദിനങളെ അവിസ്മരണീയമാക്കുന്നു
എന്തിനാണിപ്പോള് കവിതയെഴുതുന്നതു?
ഒന്നേ ചെയ്യാനുള്ളു
ഓരോ വെളുത്ത പേജിന്റെയുംഇടത്തേ മൂലയില്
വാലു പൊക്കി നിലകൊള്ളുന്നപുഴുവിനെ വരച്ചുകോറിയിടുക
പൊടുന്നനെ ആരോ എങുനിന്നോവീണ്ടും വീണ്ടും മെസ്സേജയക്കുന്നു
നിങളുദെ വാക്കുകള്
എന്നിലാണു സമയം പോക്കുന്നതു
ഉദ്യാനത്തില് തുംബികള് പാരും പോല്
എന്നിലാനു പാറിക്കളിക്കുന്നതു
നിങല്ക്ക് നാവില് സൂര്യനും
ചുണ്ടില് ചന്ദ്രനും കണ്ണില് കടലും
കഴുത്തില് ശംഖും
യോനിയില് തീയും മുലയില് തേനുമുണ്ട്, തീര്ച്ച
തലയില് നിറയെ മണ്ട്ത്തരങളും ചളിയുമായിരിക്കും
മനോഹരമായ ആ തവിട്ടുകാല്പാദങള്, ഹൊ
ചൊറിയുന്ന കാല്പ്പനികതയോ എന്തുമാകട്ടെ എനിക്കു
നിങള്ക്കിഷ്ടമുള്ള ഒരിടത്തു തൊടാന് എന്നെ അനവദിക്കണം
translation of this poem 'onnu thodaan' was forwaded by friend Dr. C S Venkiteswaran:
To Touch…
Someone who has much to say
Keeps mum
While one with nothing much to say
Blabbers on
Everyone is making days memorable
inadvertently wetting their underclothes.
Why write poems now
There is only one thing to do
Doodle the worm that hovers
With its tail raised
At the left-hand corner
Of every white page
Suddenly someone from somewhere
Messages again and again :
Your words are wasted on me
Like dragonflies fluttering in the garden
Like dragonflies fluttering in the garden
They flurry in me
You have sun in your tongue
Moon in your lips
Sea in your eyes
Conch in your neck
Fire in your vagina
And honey in your breasts, I am sure.
The head maybe burstingWith stupidities and dirt..
Those brown legs, oh..
Let it be that annoying romanticism of mine
Or whatever..
Or whatever..
You should let me
Touch you somewhere you like.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
HIDE and SEEK
Hide n' Seek is a show curated by me in Gallery OED, Cochin.
12th to 26th of July, 2008.
Hide n’ seek
Concept note
Hide and seek is generally regarded as a child’s game. One can play it only in groups. This play involves no toys as such but one’s own expressions, body and all such possible identifying signals being kept away from notice while provoking and misguiding the one who is desperately running around to catch the other from a ‘hide-out’. It is a play with identity as an object/toy in disguise.
Such toying around is delightful with unconscious motivations for pleasure. Scaled down in privilege, it provides access and ownership of anything in inverse proportions, huge and massive in handy forms or microbial objects in demonic size. There is implied something militant and subversive in spirit, in the sense of distorting an opaque reality in order to survive and get hold of it. We are generally made unaware of this militant quest within us for pleasurable access to a world so chaotic and inaccessible.
Play is often branded as nonsensical and vulnerable in the adult world and is supposed to inflict licentious indulgences suiting only to the life of ‘irresponsible ones’ and immature childhoods. For instance, toy-playing specifically is associated with a certain stage in life before getting initiated to a systematic elderly knowledge. They are even graded as ‘maturity / suitability markers’ in a child’s mental and physical capabilities (for children of 1 to 3 years of age or 5 to 7 years of age etc. as enlisted in the literature generally provided by the industry that produces and packages it). Thus, hurriedly one graduates to a ‘toy / play -less’ state of affairs. But the absence of play is an obstacle to the development of healthy and creative individuals. It is also believed that play is necessary for mastering emotional traumas or disturbances.
Concept note
Hide and seek is generally regarded as a child’s game. One can play it only in groups. This play involves no toys as such but one’s own expressions, body and all such possible identifying signals being kept away from notice while provoking and misguiding the one who is desperately running around to catch the other from a ‘hide-out’. It is a play with identity as an object/toy in disguise.
Such toying around is delightful with unconscious motivations for pleasure. Scaled down in privilege, it provides access and ownership of anything in inverse proportions, huge and massive in handy forms or microbial objects in demonic size. There is implied something militant and subversive in spirit, in the sense of distorting an opaque reality in order to survive and get hold of it. We are generally made unaware of this militant quest within us for pleasurable access to a world so chaotic and inaccessible.
Play is often branded as nonsensical and vulnerable in the adult world and is supposed to inflict licentious indulgences suiting only to the life of ‘irresponsible ones’ and immature childhoods. For instance, toy-playing specifically is associated with a certain stage in life before getting initiated to a systematic elderly knowledge. They are even graded as ‘maturity / suitability markers’ in a child’s mental and physical capabilities (for children of 1 to 3 years of age or 5 to 7 years of age etc. as enlisted in the literature generally provided by the industry that produces and packages it). Thus, hurriedly one graduates to a ‘toy / play -less’ state of affairs. But the absence of play is an obstacle to the development of healthy and creative individuals. It is also believed that play is necessary for mastering emotional traumas or disturbances.
So, whenever need occurs to hide seek and survive, it puts us in very ‘embarrassing’ ‘caught silly’ ‘amoral’ ‘vulnerable’ ‘minimal’ and ‘nonsense’ situations.
‘Hiding’ is at once about ‘revealing’ so as to continue playing because hiding desires by default a seeking other – a seeking viewer to find it from the hide out. It reveals a creative situation against the rules of all that are ‘make believe’, sophisticated, regimental and alienating.
Curatorial intention here is to identify some such chips among us, multiple small catchers of pleasures playing a sort of conceal-reveal game through their works. Art object is a potential toy, the marker of profoundly idiosyncratic and ‘quantum states’ of artistic subjectivity.
Yours truly,
Kavitha Balakrishnan
for the works exhibited in the show kindly visit this link:
review by John Xaviers currently doing M.Phil at JNU, Delhi
Art Gallery being a Playground
“Art as an activity is a conflation of child-like play and adult-like responsibility,” feels John Xaviers while visiting a group show, Hide & Seek at OED Gallery, Kochi. Anpu Varkey, Kajal Shah, Kavita Balakrishnan, Neema Vaghela, Pramodh Kumar, Prasad K P, Ruchin Soni, Roopasri, Sujil S, Sujith K S, Sumesh Kamballur, Umesh Unni and Varun Cursetji are the artists participating in the show.
In the movie Chronicles of Narnia a group of kids play ‘hide and seek’ and the smallest girl hides inside a cupboard and slides into a snowy fantasyland to which the rear of the cupboard opened. She returns and takes all the kids into this fantasyland. The cupboard is a threshold between reality and fantasy, an escape route into a new way of looking at the world, made possible through the act of hiding in the child’s game.
In the show Hide & Seek, on view in Gallery OED, Kochi, the curator Kavita Balakrishnan has included a painting by Varun Cursetji which depicts a wooden piece of furniture that resembles a cupboard with an open door, inviting a small child playing ‘hide & seek’ to hide inside, and maybe to explore another world within, towards the wilderness of a floral world, as the piece of furniture is set against an arabesque design pattern.
Children understand the world through play. Pedagogues insist on the importance of including play as an integral part of educating the small ones. As one attains adulthood, this element of play gradually diminishes in the seriousness of life, which Kavita Balakrishnan describes as “hurriedly graduating into a toy-less state”. But adults resort to game-like situations to let off the steam. What is so refreshing about a Yahoo! Chat, or a Federer vs. Nadal Wimbledon final or an MTV Splitsvilla or a Jaane Tu, ya Jaane Na is that, it is ‘play’, though it may or may not throw some light on life.
There are times in the life of an adult when the child’s games have to be replayed. It is when the adult has to play the role of a parent or a grandparent. The parent desires and possesses toys very much like the child; through the child. The parent plays with the child in games that children play. The curator Kavita Balakrishnan is such a parent of a small child. The curator has expanded and transferred the childlike playfulness embodied in her domesticity onto the fetishistic surfaces of the gallery walls, in that she describes in her curatorial note, “Art object is a potential toy, the marker of…idiosyncratic…artistic subjectivity.”
Art has ‘playfulness’ written all over its face. The artist knows that what is being done is not serious, in that it is not going to make any substantive change in the circumstantial realities like a political legislation does, but at the same time there is an assumed seriousness, as in the ‘hide & seek’ game of a child. It is important here to understand that, though both the child and the artist are ‘playing’ as a way of seeing the world in ways in which it has not been understood before, the artist’s play is conscious, calculated and result-oriented. Art as an activity is a conflation of child-like play and adult-like responsibility.
The artists included in ‘Hide & Seek’ are mostly beginners, very young painters in the budding stages of their artistic career, not weighed down by private gallery assignments, but dabbling with paint like children in search of a pictorial language. Anpu Varkey, Kajal Shah, Kavita Balakrishnan, Neema Vaghela, Pramodh Kumar, Prasad K P, Ruchin Soni, Roopasri, Sujil S, Sujith K S, Sumesh Kamballur, Umesh Unni and Varun Cursetji have been shown with a couple of their paintings.
Kavita Balakrishnan has resorted to the pictorial grammar of political cartoons in a triptych of small canvases, where the repeating imagery is that of the Malayalee politician in characteristic white shirt and white mundu, with outstretched banners as the backdrops. In one of the frames, a group of politicians have gathered around a hospital bed, on which a man is ailing presumably in a political violence as in Kannur with a backdrop banner which claims “we condemn”. It is not only in wash treatment that Kavita Balakrishnan has assumed a childlike-ness, but in the very sarcastic attitude like that of a illustrative cartoonist, which is nothing less than the openness of a child who saw that the emperor is naked. In choosing the water colors of Prasad K.P, who is a final year B.F.A student of painting in Trissur Govt. Fine Arts College where Kavita Balakrishnan teaches art history, the curator is not only bringing the young painter under her wings, but also is letting the world know of the young boy’s anxieties about the changing landscape of agricultural land in Kerala. One of the images quoted by Prasad is that of JCB earth remover, which is a loaded imagery ever since Chief Minister Achyuthanandan’s revenue land recovery campaign in Munnar, where JCBs were put to use indiscriminately. Are JCBs toys?
Many of the works in the show have white backgrounds, like the clean white papers of a school kid’s notebook on which scribbles have been made out of boredom or curiosity. As if an illustration of this curatorial project, Pramodh Kumar’s painting is a huge white canvas on which horizontal lines and margins are running across as in a ruled notebook with numbers written in childish handwriting on the margin with white paint which is barely visible against white background. What catches the attention of the viewer, as a rupture is an array of colorful toffees across the canvas, at which a cute cat in pink lines straight out of a step-by-step drawing book, curiously looks on. Maybe this picture encapsulates the curatorial idea and it is not surprising that Gallery OED has chosen the image of the cat and toffees, for print and web publicity, as the identity of the show Hide & Seek.
Equally cute is the painting of a puppy by Neema Vaghela, in which the puppy placed right in the centre of the canvas gladly looks out of the canvas. Another painting by Neema in bright red background has a Taj Mahal on top centre, with so many cartoon-like scooters running up and down across the frame, as if straight out of a 2D animated cartoon for kids and there is an embracing couple in a bottom corner. In Neema’s paintings, the objects are closer to the “potential toys”, in form and affects.
In Ruchin Soni’s paintings, whether the artist has intended it or not, the large figures that fill the big canvas space contrasting from the background in almost complementary colors, are reminiscent of the yaksha-gana imageries of the primeval Indian sculptural traditions, with the bare heads, large eyes and fully rounded figuration. For the same association with yaksha-gana, the images exude a carnivalistic joyous playfulness. Moreover, the spot light beams falling longitudinally along the frame, allows a chromatic tonal hide and seek.
Notwithstanding some misfits as inclusions in the curatorial scheme, Hide & Seek is a very refreshing show that prompts us to look at life like a child does, not only to see it differently, but also to ease the anxieties through ‘play’ as an emotional outlet. Moreover the show is self-reflexive of gallery based art practice as it turns a mirror at the playfulness of the artists and the toy-like functions of the art objects.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
i'm a doll wid ball-like ears
i'm a doll with ball-like ears
i'm a doll with ball-like ears
ma ears r running rolling n roamin, my man
up the sun down the valley
up the moon down the stream
what did u do to me?
what did u do to me?
i'm a doll this way
i'm a doll that way oh!
their words their moods
their tones thier lullaby
but its ours, man
its terribly ours....
my ears,they r balls
my balls rolling
your balls rolling
the roller coaster wat a booster ma man!
i'm a doll with ball-like ears
ma ears r running rolling n roamin, my man
up the sun down the valley
up the moon down the stream
what did u do to me?
what did u do to me?
i'm a doll this way
i'm a doll that way oh!
their words their moods
their tones thier lullaby
but its ours, man
its terribly ours....
my ears,they r balls
my balls rolling
your balls rolling
the roller coaster wat a booster ma man!
wat did i say just now
what did i say just now?
something wrong
something chaste
something witty
something out of the box
a rabbit out of your box, l'ol man!
relax.....
something wrong
something chaste
something witty
something out of the box
a rabbit out of your box, l'ol man!
relax.....
who am i
who 'm i to you, young man
a mote in your eye that quenches you in a spur
a kiss you type 'n clone on my snap of face
a moth that prays up hill n upside down
who 'm i to you, young man
so much of heat
so much of rain
so much of snow
who am i to you, young man
what the heaven u gonna do wid me?
tell me how many strings in your guitar..
tell me how many strokes in mine
tell me, tell me
who am i to you young man?
a mote in your eye that quenches you in a spur
a kiss you type 'n clone on my snap of face
a moth that prays up hill n upside down
who 'm i to you, young man
so much of heat
so much of rain
so much of snow
who am i to you, young man
what the heaven u gonna do wid me?
tell me how many strings in your guitar..
tell me how many strokes in mine
tell me, tell me
who am i to you young man?
Thursday, October 2, 2008
where were you
where were you yesterday, dear man
where were you yesterday?
in the darkness of night
you were thinking of me
smoking a cigaar
driving a car
dreaming a cheek
entering a gateway
looking over the window to the river
perplexed to change your gear
condemning the high flood of light
that dashed you
where were you yesterday, dear man
where were you yesterday
in the darkness of night
when i was simply staring at the gray leaves outside?
where were you yesterday?
in the darkness of night
you were thinking of me
smoking a cigaar
driving a car
dreaming a cheek
entering a gateway
looking over the window to the river
perplexed to change your gear
condemning the high flood of light
that dashed you
where were you yesterday, dear man
where were you yesterday
in the darkness of night
when i was simply staring at the gray leaves outside?
oh my lovely man
a lovely man
in the monsoon country
a prickly man
in the monsoon country
with so full of pains
Ummmmm...so full of pains
o my painful man,
wear it like a radio
not like a cameo
in the monsoon country
a prickly man
in the monsoon country
with so full of pains
Ummmmm...so full of pains
o my painful man,
wear it like a radio
not like a cameo
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
remembrance of things past with sarah abraham
An interview with
Sara Abraham, a major connoisseur of Modern Indian Art.
In the post-independent scenario of Indian Art, Sara Abraham emerged as a very significant art promoter of national importance from South India. ‘Kalayathra’, a travelling Art gallery, was an altogether new proposition in nineteen sixties. Most of the big names in Indian Art world today have inspired her to run ambitious ventures, also very well enjoyed her support as an entrepreneur of art.
She began her career as an avid art collector and gallerist at a time when economic valuation of Indian art was not as pronounced as it is today. It was a time when she had not many role models to look up to. As noted by A.Ramachandran, an artist-major from her generation, that was a time ‘when Indian Art market was revolving around the likes and dislikes of foreigners’. Sara had newly identified a range of potential art lovers and Indian buyers for Art across the country from various vantage points.
She thrived simply after a deep set passion and conviction for collecting good works of art. When women artists were very less in number a woman connoisseur was even rarer figure in the earliest decades of post-independent India. She sta
rted her venture and proceeded with it against a cool society and family around (except for an insightful husband and cultured parents) that did not bother much about art as a cherishable and tasteful investment. Today interestingly, there are many women in India practising as gallerists like, Shireen Gandhi of Chemould, Gita Mehra of Sakshi, Shalini Sahany of Guild, Usha Mirchandni of Gallery Mirchandani and Mamta Singania of Anand in Delhi. And Indian Art world today is fast dispersing into mainstream international valuations.
In this fleetingly changed world, one chooses to speak to a person with definite insights that are gathered from lively interaction with Art and artists for a lifetime. Obviously, as we proceeded, the talk easily ran beyond the ‘personal’ and became very much ‘historic’ and self explanatory.
So, have a read:
K: You started off as an artist. You got trained under D.P.Roychowdhury and K.C.S.Panikkar. But after passing out from Madras college of art, you took a lesser treaded route for that moment. You moved towards becoming an art collector. Why did you choose to focus on dealing with art as a gallerist and collector rather than being an artist?
Sara: I appreciated art all my life. From the age of seven, i used to love drawing. And as i grew older, i was sent to school of arts in Madras. In my schooling in Darjeeling where i was a boarder, i did Royal academy school exams as an Honours student and i learnt portraits, realistic portraits. When i got married i had nothing to do. I thought to do portraits. I made some money too. But i also started buying art. Quite often i bought much better works, with that amount. All the spare cash i ever had, went into art. Then i understood my mediocrity and i gave up doing art but started buying art. And after buying art for a decade, M.F. Hussain came up with an inspiring idea of a gallery. There were by then some Art galleries in India but he said they were all money-making concerns, and he offered support for a gallery with deeper concerns for Art.
K: Yes, you started ‘Kalayathra’ gallery. What were your motivating factors? What were the challenges involved in it?
Sara: Look, at that time i was very anxious to make people aware of Art. In south India, music and dance had a very good place and Art didn’t. I felt that it is unfair for a medium of expression that is so vibrant and so visual that anyone can see and appreciate. I felt that not seeing is the problem. Then Hussain said to me, look there are gallery owners all over but they all have money making concerns. Why don’t you start a gallery? .........But then, I didn’t want a static gallery. It didn’t excite me. So i sat down and thought. Then I got the idea of a travelling gallery. It was a completely new idea. No one thought of it or did something that way. I thought South must go to the North, North must go to the South. East to the West and West to the East. This can happen only in a travelling gallery. So I just started. Prathap pothan gave the name ‘Kalayatra’. Dharani gave the logo of a woman’s feet. Hussain gave the idea of a gallery. It all happened like that.
K: Then how did you go about it? With a huge number of paintings and their artists you travelled all along the country and even outside....
Sara: I had decided that I would promote art with a singular devotion. People would see Art and not me as central figure. I wanted to show art, give it the importance that everyone could see and appreciate, as Balasarswathi or Rugmini Devi Arundel did for dance. But I didn’t have a role model in art. Here is a proposition that is completely new. I don’t like doing what everyone does. There is no challenge in doing what other people do.
K: Still who were there in other parts of the country who could be looked up to for some similar form of your practice?
Sara: Keku Gandhi of Chemould, Dadabhai of Pundhol, Alkasi of Delhi art Heritage..... there weren’t many. But two or three were there. That time not many were buying art. Artists were powerless. So they agreed to anything any gallery did that time. I was scrupulously honest. I will take one third only because a travelling exhibition was expensive. I also started to show Art at five star hotels which was not a venue supposed ever for it. When I started doing that people started coming. The rich won’t come that time to art galleries. They didn’t necessarily visit Lalith Kala Gallery. When they come visiting these hotels and see an art exhibition, they walk in. When I did my first exhibition in Bombay, i sold out. I didn’t have one picture to take back. We even packed by ourselves. We couldn’t afford packers that time.
K: Then how was the first Kalayatra exhibition?
As the first Kalayathra exhibition was over, I had just enough to pay the advance at Taj coromandel Madras, for the next show. I had such faith that I would be able to meet my expenses. I wasn’t bothered about anything more than that. So I booked the Taj Coromandel for the next exhibition. Then with that I went to Kochi. From Kochi I went to Calcutta. I did it from one exhibition to the other, always covering cost. Never out of pocket. I never made much money that time. But people came to know about the travelling exhibition. And people came to buy works.. I had no problem about buyers. They knew that I was giving good stuff. They knew that I was not simply making money. They knew that I was fervently in love with the works I showed.
K: How do you see ‘art’ primarily as? As an investment or a piece to cherish? There is a common concept that a piece of investment is always an impersonal object to be rolled. So investment potential is often portrayed as falling in inverse proportion to ‘personal cherishability’ of a work of art. What do you think?
Sara: I don’t look around and say I am worth crore. I’m not interested...... what happened in my case was I knew what I wanted. I don’t look at art in any other manner. See, when I conduct an exhibition I did not pick up a single piece at the outset. After everyone was given a chance to buy I took the remaining pieces. Even when I was doing static gallery like in Bangalore, by that time I was well known and I was making money, all the money went back into art. I ran a gallery for 40-50 years. Even before that I used to buy Art. Not a single item I sold has come back to me for resale.
K: It’s interesting. You are of course nourished by Art as well as you nourished it to grow. But was there any such moment in life that art really came for your help?
Of course Art is money. I did sell some works when in sudden need of money. I sold my Gaitonde for fifteen lakhs couple of years back. But you know it completely broke my heart. I had only one Gaitonde. There was not more than that i could buy at some earlier points of time. But i don’t still look at Art simply in terms of money.
K: How do you judge a work of art?
Sara: Years of looking! From seven years old to the age of eighty. Who looked at Art when i looked? They looked at saris and diamonds...or music and dance. So what you see around me now in this house is from that time. It is just that God made me with a different taste.
K: ‘Kalayathra’ show in Kochi was perhaps the greatest national exhibition in a gigantic scale conducted with proper planning that was ever witnessed by people in Kerala, your home state. What were the responses you got from various corners like government, lalith kala academi and general public?
Sara: Very poor. From my community, no one came. Except my 2 cousines. For the first exhibition, Mrs. K.M. Mathew from Malayala Manorama came and gave lot of publicity for which i gave her a Bikash Bhattacharji. Second time when i came with a show, it was financed by Mr. M A Baby, now minister for education in the state. It was at durbar hall, Ernakulam. That gallery was opened with my exhibition. Entire collection was financed by baby. Show was for a month. response was very poor for the effort i invested and financial support that baby has put into it, Papers also didn’t write.
.... It was a tremendous exhibition. I personally hung up every picture there. Carried from Hussain to Ramachandran to Subrahmaniam to many others in an order so as to educate anybody coming there. My cousines came and showed their face to me and not to art...... Culture is to be ingrained..... otherwise this is only consumer culture. A relative came one day and asked for a ‘big’ piece of painting for 10000/- i said you will not even get a small line drawing for it. The idea was that she wanted to get a big piece and she wants to get it cheep. If i had done a diamond exhibition every woman would have been there. I had very enlightened parents. My parents discussed art culture food or politics with us children.... today in households; everyone is busy drinking and eating or simply consumer spending. Bigger the TV, better. bigger the car better. We never grew up like that. Perhaps that is my asset.
K: What is lacking?
Sara: Awareness. Kerala is not an unintelligent community. If they read, they will come. I blame the media. Some media houses were against M.A. Baby and the credit being gone to him.
K: what about Infrastructure...
Not simply in Kerala, anywhere in India, it is a problem....lack of an Art-informed audience is very much there. what do schools teach? We should get knowledgible intellectual artists for the young generation to talk interact and share. We have many artists who are articulate enough. Get them to speak to u...share their works and recognize the challenges in Art practice. But today to get to see an artist is very difficult as to get to see a prime minister.
K: Great is your family portrait done by Bikash Bhattacharji. Seems from a photograph as he always used to do? How do you remember that event?
Sara: He studied each person spending a lot of his time....we all in the family could gather very rarely. Children were always away for studies. Each time each of them came, he came home and sketched... . Then he put it together. Magnificent it came out.....
K: What kind of an involvement you had with the artists of the time when you were actively into art collecting? We love to hear your ruminations over many established artists of today who were at their early careers when you collected them.........
Sara: We all grew together. K.G.Subrahmanian, Lakshma Gawde, Ramkinker, Gaitonde.... I’d known M.F Hussain for more than 60 yrs. Every x-mas he’d come with a picture rolled up in his hand. It all started when i bought my first Hussain many years back. i saw a picture in Chemold. A small one. I wanted it. And i had no money. I said to them that i will pay half. Other half i’ll pay over a period of four months. Since they know me for sometime, they trusted me. Do you know what i did? i was wearing diamond earrings that my mother had presented me. I straight went to Jhaveri bazaar. I sold it. Put the money down at Chemold. Thats how i bought it.
K: M F Hussain is in exile today! A student is put in jail right from his classroom internals for allegedly obscene presentation of Gods. Dr.Shivji Panikkar, the art history teacher who supported him and defended the Indian art history for its rich human expressions, is punished by university authorities.
Sara: Ya, today at this moment Shivaji panikkar is in truble as the news goes....
K: So, freedom of artistic expression is a contested issue even in one of the world’s ‘ largest democracies’. What do you feel about such political state of art affairs today?
Sara: Because extremists are making it political. No other reason is there. What they are doing is putting Victorian petticoats on gods and goddesses. This narrow minded outlook is ridiculous. People who do this they don’t know Hinduism. Tell one Hindu goddess who was clothed till Ravi Varma’s time? Sexuality was not defamed subject in early India. We considered it as honourable as religion. For Indian mind body was not a discredited thing. It is not lust we see in body. It was so open and shown that men didn’t lust after the body. Some must of course have misused it. But by and large, body of men and women are considered as perfection of god. Hinduism framed and glorified body. Islam covered it. As a religion it is more mental. Islam is a very beautiful religion in a different way. But there is nothing in religion to fight about. Gandhi had no fight with Islam or any religion. Narrow minded people of today are doing it.
And see, Hussain has done nothing against Hinduism or against any religion for that matter. He is a very religious person and a very good man, warm hearted, all-giving, generous and thinking person. People just don’t know this when they condemn him.
K: Today our ‘artworld’ seems to be increasingly conscious of the role of art market just as it is conscious of aesthetic judgements and critical practices. Millions are floated into the flux of art market today. Major art funds are forming. Corporate participation in Indian Art market is growing in proportion. So collectors and artists are also very energetic. But it has its own problems -like artists are increasingly said to be ‘under market pressures’ that care for nothing but ‘sufficient productivity of a promised quality as fostered by the market demands’. What do you say about such ‘market pressures on artists’? How do you look at today’s art collector’s attitude?
Sara: sometimes I am rather contemptuous of the way things are going now. Buyers are often blindly pouring money and I think the artist is losing his values. Even a boy out of school of arts whom i wouldn’t even look at, would demand a huge sum for a sketch he makes. It is ridiculous. U must grow gradually if u r to become an artist. U must see. U must travel. Todays artists r making pictures out of colours and black and white to entice the eye.
K: But it is also that a few of younger generation of artists are more focused and articulate in their art today. May be partially because of the new found financial security they are gaining. They are not as powerless as they were before....
Sara: Human eye appreciates kitsch before they appreciate art. So glitter is the catch word. It is very important fact that it takes years for the eye to discard kitsch. We like loud sounds before music. Grotesque poses before dance. One needs to refine one’s taste. That u can do only through incessant watching of good art. But i am sorry that i can’t travel much now and see the youngsters works enough today. I get feedbacks that there r some young artists working in fine arts colleges in kerala now ...
K: you were a multi tasking person as a woman. Why did you suddenly leave the practice and close ‘Kalayathra’?
Sara: Ya, one can of course do house work, do job or function with an art gallery. I have done it. But you can not have a major calamity in life and do justice to art promotion. That is why i stopped running ‘Kalayatra’ as i had to look after my daughter who was ill. I could somehow afford to go out and sit like this. Good that i came out of the field before it gets into the form as it is now with decaying artistic values. For me it was very easy leaving except that it broke my heart to leave Art. Artists and buyers trusted me and they got something from my gallery. To leave such position was difficult. When I was doing gallery, no other gallery in Bangalore did this. Moment i left, many sprouted. See, I had a complete calling for art. Even now I assist people to buy good works. But i don’t take a commission since I am not running a gallery. Now I am rather happy with life. Somewhere on the way i had to draw a line. I am secure enough to know that I have enough lived. I have a beautiful roof over my head and ample Art that live well with me in each an every spot of this house.
K: But you never drew a line in the beginning....
Sara: I never did so because I was actually beginning something new. I borrowed money from my sister and ran exhibition for the first time.
K: yes, you had to build up the very platform on which to stand, a sort of positive space where the nation at large was envisaged in terms of Art. Your collection is a true slice of such a modernist taste...
Sara: My entire collection is getting documented now. A catalogue is shortly to be published. I am very glad to tell you that Gallery Sumukha in Chennai is going to make a huge show of this complete collection on my eightieth birthday. The show will start on February 9th, 2008.
K: A much awaited show indeed...thank you very much.
Throughout the talk, Sara Abraham was revealed as a person of crisp convictions.
Her house welcomes anybody with an A Ramachandran work of lotus pond. M.F.Hussain adorns her wall with strong fraternal charm that she explains and defends with dignity. Lakshma Gawd’s letters to her are framed beautifully. They seemed like testimonials of immense sharing possible through Art between sensitive artists and tasteful connoisseurs.
Human relationships, as expressed through such refined creative filters easily overcome personal fancies and touch the deeper veins of history. It happens only when Art works are nourished as deliberate choices with discretion. Then Art enters the well-informed human sphere of interaction. Sara Abraham knew it very well.
She envisaged an Indian Art in all its modern forms. Her collection generally shows an affinity for figurative language. Some interesting abstractions are also there in her collection, like Ghaitonde and Viswanathan. But anything done with carelessness made her contemptuous. The whole gamut of decorative distortions from regional art centres and the kitschy academicism do not figure in her collection. She had the skill to identify masters at their very mastery. So she now treasures skilfully rendered crows by K.G.Subrahmaniam or thoroughly sinuous expressiveness of tropical flora and fauna by A Ramachandran.
F.N.Souza, Ganesh Haloi, Gogi Saroj Pal, Ramanujam, Bikash Bhattacharji, Tyeb Mehta, Vivan Sundaram, Ganesh Pyne, Jogen Chawdhury and Janaky Ram are some of those displayed in this house with propriety.
Sara may cross her fingers to the complexities in pos- modern fragmentation of tastes. She might not be totally comfortable with the way a fast expanding Art world functions today. But she had created a set of new frameworks to practice Modern Art in India, a sort of space where human dignity could be constantly negotiated.
Any discourse will have a certain impasse after a flooding of brainstorming openings. The time comes when ‘quality standards’ are to be reformulated. Sara Abraham and her much convincing collection of modern Indian Art will be a historic pointer at this stage.
Sara Abraham, a major connoisseur of Modern Indian Art.
In the post-independent scenario of Indian Art, Sara Abraham emerged as a very significant art promoter of national importance from South India. ‘Kalayathra’, a travelling Art gallery, was an altogether new proposition in nineteen sixties. Most of the big names in Indian Art world today have inspired her to run ambitious ventures, also very well enjoyed her support as an entrepreneur of art.
She began her career as an avid art collector and gallerist at a time when economic valuation of Indian art was not as pronounced as it is today. It was a time when she had not many role models to look up to. As noted by A.Ramachandran, an artist-major from her generation, that was a time ‘when Indian Art market was revolving around the likes and dislikes of foreigners’. Sara had newly identified a range of potential art lovers and Indian buyers for Art across the country from various vantage points.
She thrived simply after a deep set passion and conviction for collecting good works of art. When women artists were very less in number a woman connoisseur was even rarer figure in the earliest decades of post-independent India. She sta
rted her venture and proceeded with it against a cool society and family around (except for an insightful husband and cultured parents) that did not bother much about art as a cherishable and tasteful investment. Today interestingly, there are many women in India practising as gallerists like, Shireen Gandhi of Chemould, Gita Mehra of Sakshi, Shalini Sahany of Guild, Usha Mirchandni of Gallery Mirchandani and Mamta Singania of Anand in Delhi. And Indian Art world today is fast dispersing into mainstream international valuations.In this fleetingly changed world, one chooses to speak to a person with definite insights that are gathered from lively interaction with Art and artists for a lifetime. Obviously, as we proceeded, the talk easily ran beyond the ‘personal’ and became very much ‘historic’ and self explanatory.
So, have a read:
K: You started off as an artist. You got trained under D.P.Roychowdhury and K.C.S.Panikkar. But after passing out from Madras college of art, you took a lesser treaded route for that moment. You moved towards becoming an art collector. Why did you choose to focus on dealing with art as a gallerist and collector rather than being an artist?
Sara: I appreciated art all my life. From the age of seven, i used to love drawing. And as i grew older, i was sent to school of arts in Madras. In my schooling in Darjeeling where i was a boarder, i did Royal academy school exams as an Honours student and i learnt portraits, realistic portraits. When i got married i had nothing to do. I thought to do portraits. I made some money too. But i also started buying art. Quite often i bought much better works, with that amount. All the spare cash i ever had, went into art. Then i understood my mediocrity and i gave up doing art but started buying art. And after buying art for a decade, M.F. Hussain came up with an inspiring idea of a gallery. There were by then some Art galleries in India but he said they were all money-making concerns, and he offered support for a gallery with deeper concerns for Art.
K: Yes, you started ‘Kalayathra’ gallery. What were your motivating factors? What were the challenges involved in it?
Sara: Look, at that time i was very anxious to make people aware of Art. In south India, music and dance had a very good place and Art didn’t. I felt that it is unfair for a medium of expression that is so vibrant and so visual that anyone can see and appreciate. I felt that not seeing is the problem. Then Hussain said to me, look there are gallery owners all over but they all have money making concerns. Why don’t you start a gallery? .........But then, I didn’t want a static gallery. It didn’t excite me. So i sat down and thought. Then I got the idea of a travelling gallery. It was a completely new idea. No one thought of it or did something that way. I thought South must go to the North, North must go to the South. East to the West and West to the East. This can happen only in a travelling gallery. So I just started. Prathap pothan gave the name ‘Kalayatra’. Dharani gave the logo of a woman’s feet. Hussain gave the idea of a gallery. It all happened like that.
K: Then how did you go about it? With a huge number of paintings and their artists you travelled all along the country and even outside....
Sara: I had decided that I would promote art with a singular devotion. People would see Art and not me as central figure. I wanted to show art, give it the importance that everyone could see and appreciate, as Balasarswathi or Rugmini Devi Arundel did for dance. But I didn’t have a role model in art. Here is a proposition that is completely new. I don’t like doing what everyone does. There is no challenge in doing what other people do.
K: Still who were there in other parts of the country who could be looked up to for some similar form of your practice?
Sara: Keku Gandhi of Chemould, Dadabhai of Pundhol, Alkasi of Delhi art Heritage..... there weren’t many. But two or three were there. That time not many were buying art. Artists were powerless. So they agreed to anything any gallery did that time. I was scrupulously honest. I will take one third only because a travelling exhibition was expensive. I also started to show Art at five star hotels which was not a venue supposed ever for it. When I started doing that people started coming. The rich won’t come that time to art galleries. They didn’t necessarily visit Lalith Kala Gallery. When they come visiting these hotels and see an art exhibition, they walk in. When I did my first exhibition in Bombay, i sold out. I didn’t have one picture to take back. We even packed by ourselves. We couldn’t afford packers that time.
K: Then how was the first Kalayatra exhibition?
As the first Kalayathra exhibition was over, I had just enough to pay the advance at Taj coromandel Madras, for the next show. I had such faith that I would be able to meet my expenses. I wasn’t bothered about anything more than that. So I booked the Taj Coromandel for the next exhibition. Then with that I went to Kochi. From Kochi I went to Calcutta. I did it from one exhibition to the other, always covering cost. Never out of pocket. I never made much money that time. But people came to know about the travelling exhibition. And people came to buy works.. I had no problem about buyers. They knew that I was giving good stuff. They knew that I was not simply making money. They knew that I was fervently in love with the works I showed.
K: How do you see ‘art’ primarily as? As an investment or a piece to cherish? There is a common concept that a piece of investment is always an impersonal object to be rolled. So investment potential is often portrayed as falling in inverse proportion to ‘personal cherishability’ of a work of art. What do you think?
Sara: I don’t look around and say I am worth crore. I’m not interested...... what happened in my case was I knew what I wanted. I don’t look at art in any other manner. See, when I conduct an exhibition I did not pick up a single piece at the outset. After everyone was given a chance to buy I took the remaining pieces. Even when I was doing static gallery like in Bangalore, by that time I was well known and I was making money, all the money went back into art. I ran a gallery for 40-50 years. Even before that I used to buy Art. Not a single item I sold has come back to me for resale.
K: It’s interesting. You are of course nourished by Art as well as you nourished it to grow. But was there any such moment in life that art really came for your help?
Of course Art is money. I did sell some works when in sudden need of money. I sold my Gaitonde for fifteen lakhs couple of years back. But you know it completely broke my heart. I had only one Gaitonde. There was not more than that i could buy at some earlier points of time. But i don’t still look at Art simply in terms of money.
K: How do you judge a work of art?
Sara: Years of looking! From seven years old to the age of eighty. Who looked at Art when i looked? They looked at saris and diamonds...or music and dance. So what you see around me now in this house is from that time. It is just that God made me with a different taste.
K: ‘Kalayathra’ show in Kochi was perhaps the greatest national exhibition in a gigantic scale conducted with proper planning that was ever witnessed by people in Kerala, your home state. What were the responses you got from various corners like government, lalith kala academi and general public?
Sara: Very poor. From my community, no one came. Except my 2 cousines. For the first exhibition, Mrs. K.M. Mathew from Malayala Manorama came and gave lot of publicity for which i gave her a Bikash Bhattacharji. Second time when i came with a show, it was financed by Mr. M A Baby, now minister for education in the state. It was at durbar hall, Ernakulam. That gallery was opened with my exhibition. Entire collection was financed by baby. Show was for a month. response was very poor for the effort i invested and financial support that baby has put into it, Papers also didn’t write.
.... It was a tremendous exhibition. I personally hung up every picture there. Carried from Hussain to Ramachandran to Subrahmaniam to many others in an order so as to educate anybody coming there. My cousines came and showed their face to me and not to art...... Culture is to be ingrained..... otherwise this is only consumer culture. A relative came one day and asked for a ‘big’ piece of painting for 10000/- i said you will not even get a small line drawing for it. The idea was that she wanted to get a big piece and she wants to get it cheep. If i had done a diamond exhibition every woman would have been there. I had very enlightened parents. My parents discussed art culture food or politics with us children.... today in households; everyone is busy drinking and eating or simply consumer spending. Bigger the TV, better. bigger the car better. We never grew up like that. Perhaps that is my asset.
K: What is lacking?
Sara: Awareness. Kerala is not an unintelligent community. If they read, they will come. I blame the media. Some media houses were against M.A. Baby and the credit being gone to him.
K: what about Infrastructure...
Not simply in Kerala, anywhere in India, it is a problem....lack of an Art-informed audience is very much there. what do schools teach? We should get knowledgible intellectual artists for the young generation to talk interact and share. We have many artists who are articulate enough. Get them to speak to u...share their works and recognize the challenges in Art practice. But today to get to see an artist is very difficult as to get to see a prime minister.
K: Great is your family portrait done by Bikash Bhattacharji. Seems from a photograph as he always used to do? How do you remember that event?
Sara: He studied each person spending a lot of his time....we all in the family could gather very rarely. Children were always away for studies. Each time each of them came, he came home and sketched... . Then he put it together. Magnificent it came out.....
K: What kind of an involvement you had with the artists of the time when you were actively into art collecting? We love to hear your ruminations over many established artists of today who were at their early careers when you collected them.........
Sara: We all grew together. K.G.Subrahmanian, Lakshma Gawde, Ramkinker, Gaitonde.... I’d known M.F Hussain for more than 60 yrs. Every x-mas he’d come with a picture rolled up in his hand. It all started when i bought my first Hussain many years back. i saw a picture in Chemold. A small one. I wanted it. And i had no money. I said to them that i will pay half. Other half i’ll pay over a period of four months. Since they know me for sometime, they trusted me. Do you know what i did? i was wearing diamond earrings that my mother had presented me. I straight went to Jhaveri bazaar. I sold it. Put the money down at Chemold. Thats how i bought it.
K: M F Hussain is in exile today! A student is put in jail right from his classroom internals for allegedly obscene presentation of Gods. Dr.Shivji Panikkar, the art history teacher who supported him and defended the Indian art history for its rich human expressions, is punished by university authorities.
Sara: Ya, today at this moment Shivaji panikkar is in truble as the news goes....
K: So, freedom of artistic expression is a contested issue even in one of the world’s ‘ largest democracies’. What do you feel about such political state of art affairs today?
Sara: Because extremists are making it political. No other reason is there. What they are doing is putting Victorian petticoats on gods and goddesses. This narrow minded outlook is ridiculous. People who do this they don’t know Hinduism. Tell one Hindu goddess who was clothed till Ravi Varma’s time? Sexuality was not defamed subject in early India. We considered it as honourable as religion. For Indian mind body was not a discredited thing. It is not lust we see in body. It was so open and shown that men didn’t lust after the body. Some must of course have misused it. But by and large, body of men and women are considered as perfection of god. Hinduism framed and glorified body. Islam covered it. As a religion it is more mental. Islam is a very beautiful religion in a different way. But there is nothing in religion to fight about. Gandhi had no fight with Islam or any religion. Narrow minded people of today are doing it.
And see, Hussain has done nothing against Hinduism or against any religion for that matter. He is a very religious person and a very good man, warm hearted, all-giving, generous and thinking person. People just don’t know this when they condemn him.
K: Today our ‘artworld’ seems to be increasingly conscious of the role of art market just as it is conscious of aesthetic judgements and critical practices. Millions are floated into the flux of art market today. Major art funds are forming. Corporate participation in Indian Art market is growing in proportion. So collectors and artists are also very energetic. But it has its own problems -like artists are increasingly said to be ‘under market pressures’ that care for nothing but ‘sufficient productivity of a promised quality as fostered by the market demands’. What do you say about such ‘market pressures on artists’? How do you look at today’s art collector’s attitude?
Sara: sometimes I am rather contemptuous of the way things are going now. Buyers are often blindly pouring money and I think the artist is losing his values. Even a boy out of school of arts whom i wouldn’t even look at, would demand a huge sum for a sketch he makes. It is ridiculous. U must grow gradually if u r to become an artist. U must see. U must travel. Todays artists r making pictures out of colours and black and white to entice the eye.
K: But it is also that a few of younger generation of artists are more focused and articulate in their art today. May be partially because of the new found financial security they are gaining. They are not as powerless as they were before....
Sara: Human eye appreciates kitsch before they appreciate art. So glitter is the catch word. It is very important fact that it takes years for the eye to discard kitsch. We like loud sounds before music. Grotesque poses before dance. One needs to refine one’s taste. That u can do only through incessant watching of good art. But i am sorry that i can’t travel much now and see the youngsters works enough today. I get feedbacks that there r some young artists working in fine arts colleges in kerala now ...
K: you were a multi tasking person as a woman. Why did you suddenly leave the practice and close ‘Kalayathra’?
Sara: Ya, one can of course do house work, do job or function with an art gallery. I have done it. But you can not have a major calamity in life and do justice to art promotion. That is why i stopped running ‘Kalayatra’ as i had to look after my daughter who was ill. I could somehow afford to go out and sit like this. Good that i came out of the field before it gets into the form as it is now with decaying artistic values. For me it was very easy leaving except that it broke my heart to leave Art. Artists and buyers trusted me and they got something from my gallery. To leave such position was difficult. When I was doing gallery, no other gallery in Bangalore did this. Moment i left, many sprouted. See, I had a complete calling for art. Even now I assist people to buy good works. But i don’t take a commission since I am not running a gallery. Now I am rather happy with life. Somewhere on the way i had to draw a line. I am secure enough to know that I have enough lived. I have a beautiful roof over my head and ample Art that live well with me in each an every spot of this house.
K: But you never drew a line in the beginning....
Sara: I never did so because I was actually beginning something new. I borrowed money from my sister and ran exhibition for the first time.
K: yes, you had to build up the very platform on which to stand, a sort of positive space where the nation at large was envisaged in terms of Art. Your collection is a true slice of such a modernist taste...
Sara: My entire collection is getting documented now. A catalogue is shortly to be published. I am very glad to tell you that Gallery Sumukha in Chennai is going to make a huge show of this complete collection on my eightieth birthday. The show will start on February 9th, 2008.
K: A much awaited show indeed...thank you very much.
Throughout the talk, Sara Abraham was revealed as a person of crisp convictions.
Her house welcomes anybody with an A Ramachandran work of lotus pond. M.F.Hussain adorns her wall with strong fraternal charm that she explains and defends with dignity. Lakshma Gawd’s letters to her are framed beautifully. They seemed like testimonials of immense sharing possible through Art between sensitive artists and tasteful connoisseurs.
Human relationships, as expressed through such refined creative filters easily overcome personal fancies and touch the deeper veins of history. It happens only when Art works are nourished as deliberate choices with discretion. Then Art enters the well-informed human sphere of interaction. Sara Abraham knew it very well.
She envisaged an Indian Art in all its modern forms. Her collection generally shows an affinity for figurative language. Some interesting abstractions are also there in her collection, like Ghaitonde and Viswanathan. But anything done with carelessness made her contemptuous. The whole gamut of decorative distortions from regional art centres and the kitschy academicism do not figure in her collection. She had the skill to identify masters at their very mastery. So she now treasures skilfully rendered crows by K.G.Subrahmaniam or thoroughly sinuous expressiveness of tropical flora and fauna by A Ramachandran.
F.N.Souza, Ganesh Haloi, Gogi Saroj Pal, Ramanujam, Bikash Bhattacharji, Tyeb Mehta, Vivan Sundaram, Ganesh Pyne, Jogen Chawdhury and Janaky Ram are some of those displayed in this house with propriety.
Sara may cross her fingers to the complexities in pos- modern fragmentation of tastes. She might not be totally comfortable with the way a fast expanding Art world functions today. But she had created a set of new frameworks to practice Modern Art in India, a sort of space where human dignity could be constantly negotiated.
Any discourse will have a certain impasse after a flooding of brainstorming openings. The time comes when ‘quality standards’ are to be reformulated. Sara Abraham and her much convincing collection of modern Indian Art will be a historic pointer at this stage.
intimate ghosts
Ghosts of intimate imagination
I am looking at K.sheriff’s drawings. He is not yet an assumed artist who regularly works drawings for art galleries. But he can be very well called an ‘illustrator’ because he provides picture-works to some mainstream Malayalam weeklies in Kerala since 1999. H
e has not done any other job so far.
Born in 1974, sheriff started doing drawings at the age of around twenty. In the beginning it was nothing but a curious following of his pen towards a different system of seeing things. He was actually following the footsteps of a close artist-friend who was bitten by a snake and passed away when sheriff had just finished his B.A degree. Drawing occurred to him in notebooks quite as an informal and intimate task after that incident. Pen in the notebook was taking over the dispositions of mind. Objects were emulated and the pen did the task on and on.
Think of an earthworm. Think of a jackfruit. Think of a spade. Think of an area with particular kind of soil inhabited by butterflies. Think of a bridge........all are done one after another using a pen.
Confined to a village called kuttyadi near Calicut in Kerala, sheriff now closely follows the profession that thus occurred to him. Self-image as an artist had not cropped up in him till recently.
Today Sheriff is a persistent maker of grim diminutive sketches in an intimate manner. He has no academic qualifications in art. But among the ghosts of generic pen and ink works of some art-trained illustrators of present generation in kerala, he stands alone. He gets thrown only into a limited circle of local orientations of sensibility. Still it is also that by default, as
an ‘illustrator’ in periodicals he functions within the direct regime of productive mediatic practices of creating ever-fluid audience.
Generally, these drawings enliven a sort of commonplace rubbish-ness of life around. This is a strange world of lesser human affairs. This will surely seem exotic for ‘lifestyle artists’ of today. Unlike many familiar exotica, these have no plastic finish. These are not inlays of motifs. These do not fake metallic experience s of surface. While doing illustrations, sheriff reached at curious cut-pastes of waste cloths, pieces of sack or simple mats or scrambled paper.
When surfaces are not made into motifs, when they are cut-pasted in pieces as they are, a curious assemblage occurs. It provokes one to feel that it is time now to take elements from life and objects that are yet to make histories and methods (of dealing with objects) rather than from the available images of history that run along pedagogic circuits. Ideas of inter-textuality may not help us substantially now. We should admit that we are getting bored.
Before art markets opened this wide, artists especially those trained in fine arts colleges in Kerala had acquired a particular language of making charcoal / ink drawings. Max Beckmann, Brueghel or Kitaj hovered in the air of their sketchbooks. Men, women, fish, swords, lizards, halos, trees, pots and many such images from life of labouring people, the loners, dreamers and simple inhabitants of some place or the other haunted the sketching sheets of many artists who were rearing up in this region. Though such sketches acquired some amount of local coinage, this had very little to do with the mainstream art practices in the country.
On the break of present decade, some artists (like Jyothibasu who was very much part of the above mentioned pictorial formation in Trivandrum college of fine arts in late1980s. After spending some years drawing or painting nothing, he did ‘resurrection’ series.) worked a great deal to bridge the gap. In the process, inventory of images had changed. Desolate landscapes shed off ‘the quotidian’ and assumed a sort of extra terrestrial impersonal acts of detailing and design. Many young artists from kerala today meet bleak human situations with not so bleak attitude. It can be a very positive adaptation, in terms of a productive professionalism and tasteful conception of life.
But there are humans still haunted by lively ghosts of intimate imagination, like sheriff not really bothering about the gap of tastes and geographies to be bridged in an open world.
However, ‘poor human situations’ persist in a world in which it is almost unfashionable to weep. No more simplistically accommodated is the tongue or sight of the victim except in a magazine graphics. Acceptable rather, is a vibrant
play of victimised images, if at all one is concerned with such matters and images. You may paint a half-sari clad girl wearing polyester blouse riding a cycle or u can make portraits of obsolete young men from distant villages or any such thing. It is not so much a risk. It had always been funny to look and wonder at such ghosts of imagination.
But why do humans still draw ‘poor-ish’ details of life and posit themselves in uncomfortably ironical ways as done by sheriff? One reason is that he caters to a gloomy middle class reader/viewer ship of this locale that habitually romance on lesser human orders. One can simply frame the issue almost in the way similar to what is done by Theodor Zeldin in ‘Intimate History of Humanity’. ( penguin books, 1999). He analyses interesting questions like ‘how some people have acquired immunity to loneliness’, ‘how humans have increasingly lost hope, and how new encounters and a new pair of spectacles revive them’, why even the privileged are often somewhat gloomy about life’ etc. It is revealing to see how persons / artists pay attention to or ignore the experiences of previous or distant generations and how they are continuing struggles of many other creative communities all over the world.
But when art is regarded as a creation of ‘tasteful lifestyle’, there will be efforts to sustain the regime of acceptable imagination. Certain images are forcefully made extinct by artists today. So we can not see some images properly though they are very much there, like we see glossy textiles and textures aplenty but not those with cheap prints and stains (of being used to the last of its life).
Submerged materials haunt human beings silently. When we try to make them into ‘motif’ or productive permutations and combinations, they are wishfully thought not to disturb but exist on a liberal and acceptable platform.
Sheriff so far has gained no drilling in the formal system of art education or survival lifestyle. And submerged materials and images erupt when no such guards of the system are available. When they erupt, as in sheriff’s drawings one might as well call them chaotic, archaic or obsolete, if one is not trained to see actual eruptions. But they are simply ghosts of imaginations that helplessly come alive.
If i admit with Zeldin, Imagination is simply the set of ideas that persons utilise to live a life. In other words, they are attitudes inherited from immediate precedents or from distant centuries renewing or decaying at various speeds, just like cells of the body.
And to see the ghosts very much alive, or to save ourselves a bit from our polished clownish spectatorship, where else we will go today?It is true that micro-realities of cultures and localities still keep some ghosts of imagination alive! They will throw forbidding images of filth and squalor in pretty unimaginable modes of literalness, absurdity, narration and poetic warmth.
I am looking at K.sheriff’s drawings. He is not yet an assumed artist who regularly works drawings for art galleries. But he can be very well called an ‘illustrator’ because he provides picture-works to some mainstream Malayalam weeklies in Kerala since 1999. H
e has not done any other job so far.Born in 1974, sheriff started doing drawings at the age of around twenty. In the beginning it was nothing but a curious following of his pen towards a different system of seeing things. He was actually following the footsteps of a close artist-friend who was bitten by a snake and passed away when sheriff had just finished his B.A degree. Drawing occurred to him in notebooks quite as an informal and intimate task after that incident. Pen in the notebook was taking over the dispositions of mind. Objects were emulated and the pen did the task on and on.
Think of an earthworm. Think of a jackfruit. Think of a spade. Think of an area with particular kind of soil inhabited by butterflies. Think of a bridge........all are done one after another using a pen.
Confined to a village called kuttyadi near Calicut in Kerala, sheriff now closely follows the profession that thus occurred to him. Self-image as an artist had not cropped up in him till recently.
Today Sheriff is a persistent maker of grim diminutive sketches in an intimate manner. He has no academic qualifications in art. But among the ghosts of generic pen and ink works of some art-trained illustrators of present generation in kerala, he stands alone. He gets thrown only into a limited circle of local orientations of sensibility. Still it is also that by default, as
an ‘illustrator’ in periodicals he functions within the direct regime of productive mediatic practices of creating ever-fluid audience.Generally, these drawings enliven a sort of commonplace rubbish-ness of life around. This is a strange world of lesser human affairs. This will surely seem exotic for ‘lifestyle artists’ of today. Unlike many familiar exotica, these have no plastic finish. These are not inlays of motifs. These do not fake metallic experience s of surface. While doing illustrations, sheriff reached at curious cut-pastes of waste cloths, pieces of sack or simple mats or scrambled paper.
When surfaces are not made into motifs, when they are cut-pasted in pieces as they are, a curious assemblage occurs. It provokes one to feel that it is time now to take elements from life and objects that are yet to make histories and methods (of dealing with objects) rather than from the available images of history that run along pedagogic circuits. Ideas of inter-textuality may not help us substantially now. We should admit that we are getting bored.
Before art markets opened this wide, artists especially those trained in fine arts colleges in Kerala had acquired a particular language of making charcoal / ink drawings. Max Beckmann, Brueghel or Kitaj hovered in the air of their sketchbooks. Men, women, fish, swords, lizards, halos, trees, pots and many such images from life of labouring people, the loners, dreamers and simple inhabitants of some place or the other haunted the sketching sheets of many artists who were rearing up in this region. Though such sketches acquired some amount of local coinage, this had very little to do with the mainstream art practices in the country.
On the break of present decade, some artists (like Jyothibasu who was very much part of the above mentioned pictorial formation in Trivandrum college of fine arts in late1980s. After spending some years drawing or painting nothing, he did ‘resurrection’ series.) worked a great deal to bridge the gap. In the process, inventory of images had changed. Desolate landscapes shed off ‘the quotidian’ and assumed a sort of extra terrestrial impersonal acts of detailing and design. Many young artists from kerala today meet bleak human situations with not so bleak attitude. It can be a very positive adaptation, in terms of a productive professionalism and tasteful conception of life.
But there are humans still haunted by lively ghosts of intimate imagination, like sheriff not really bothering about the gap of tastes and geographies to be bridged in an open world.
However, ‘poor human situations’ persist in a world in which it is almost unfashionable to weep. No more simplistically accommodated is the tongue or sight of the victim except in a magazine graphics. Acceptable rather, is a vibrant
play of victimised images, if at all one is concerned with such matters and images. You may paint a half-sari clad girl wearing polyester blouse riding a cycle or u can make portraits of obsolete young men from distant villages or any such thing. It is not so much a risk. It had always been funny to look and wonder at such ghosts of imagination.But why do humans still draw ‘poor-ish’ details of life and posit themselves in uncomfortably ironical ways as done by sheriff? One reason is that he caters to a gloomy middle class reader/viewer ship of this locale that habitually romance on lesser human orders. One can simply frame the issue almost in the way similar to what is done by Theodor Zeldin in ‘Intimate History of Humanity’. ( penguin books, 1999). He analyses interesting questions like ‘how some people have acquired immunity to loneliness’, ‘how humans have increasingly lost hope, and how new encounters and a new pair of spectacles revive them’, why even the privileged are often somewhat gloomy about life’ etc. It is revealing to see how persons / artists pay attention to or ignore the experiences of previous or distant generations and how they are continuing struggles of many other creative communities all over the world.
But when art is regarded as a creation of ‘tasteful lifestyle’, there will be efforts to sustain the regime of acceptable imagination. Certain images are forcefully made extinct by artists today. So we can not see some images properly though they are very much there, like we see glossy textiles and textures aplenty but not those with cheap prints and stains (of being used to the last of its life).
Submerged materials haunt human beings silently. When we try to make them into ‘motif’ or productive permutations and combinations, they are wishfully thought not to disturb but exist on a liberal and acceptable platform.
Sheriff so far has gained no drilling in the formal system of art education or survival lifestyle. And submerged materials and images erupt when no such guards of the system are available. When they erupt, as in sheriff’s drawings one might as well call them chaotic, archaic or obsolete, if one is not trained to see actual eruptions. But they are simply ghosts of imaginations that helplessly come alive.
If i admit with Zeldin, Imagination is simply the set of ideas that persons utilise to live a life. In other words, they are attitudes inherited from immediate precedents or from distant centuries renewing or decaying at various speeds, just like cells of the body.
And to see the ghosts very much alive, or to save ourselves a bit from our polished clownish spectatorship, where else we will go today?It is true that micro-realities of cultures and localities still keep some ghosts of imagination alive! They will throw forbidding images of filth and squalor in pretty unimaginable modes of literalness, absurdity, narration and poetic warmth.
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