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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