- The Hindu Arpana Caur. Photo: Thulasi Kakkat
Special Arrangement One of
Caur's works.
Celebrated artist Arpana Caur talks about the deep connect between art and realism at her Chennai show
Arpana Caur has just been transported from a pleasant New Delhi to a hot
Chennai on a sultry afternoon. Her simple white kurta has been squirted
liberally with yellow colour while she was struggling to get her interactive
installation just right at Gallery Veda. And as we begin this interview,
there’s a power cut.
But the celebrated artist remains calm, handling it all with
trademark grace and simplicity. A minor breakthrough on the installation earns
the young artist who helped her liberal praise (“you’re a genius!”), the heat
is resolved by sitting out on the terrace with chai, and the kurta, well,
that’s just written off as one the joys of “old-fashioned painting”.
“There’s a sensuous pleasure in the weight of the paint when you
lay it on the brush, just as there’s a pleasure in being splashed with colour,
even if you know you’ll never be able to wear the dress again,” she says,
looking down at her kurta ruefully. “Nowadays, I feel that old-fashioned oil
paintings are increasingly being replaced by new media, graphics and
installations, but they’re just as valid as those other forms.”
Infusing life into this art form was the inspiration behind her
new exhibition in Chennai, provocatively titled ‘Painting is not dead’. The
show is her first in Chennai in 25 years, and her first solo show in a long
time.
“When I came in 1988, there was hardly an art market in Chennai;
the show was mostly an excuse to visit Mahabalipuram,” says the 59-year-old
with a smile. That previous trip’s legacy can still be seen in her works today,
in the yogis and yoginis standing on one foot doing penance, inspired by
Arjuna’s Penance relief.
Her travels over the years have taken her from the temples of
Thanjavur to the monasteries of Leh, from caves in Sri
Lanka to holy sites in Jerusalem, and she draws inspiration from
their ancient folk art and spiritual traditions. “There is so much richness and
colour in tradition and myth; it’s a well one can keep drawing from,” she says.
Collection for Chennai
This collection in Chennai is a microcosm, in a sense, of
Arpana’s works over the last two decades (“I thought, let me have bits and
pieces of all I’ve done in the last 25 years”), with many paintings having been
done specially for this exhibition. You have, for instance, her famous ‘thread
of life’ series about the passage of time, with the scissor as a recurring
metaphorical motif (“my husband is quite sick of scissors — I’ve been drawing
them for 15 years!”); you have the meditative abstract figuratives featuring
Kabir, Buddha, Sikh mystics and yogis. Graceful figures — usually female — flow
against vast oil canvases filled with bold yellows, reds, blacks and mystical
blues. Powerful symbols of bones (a new motif used in this show) and swords
talk of the violence and inequalities of our world, and broken-backed figures
of labourers and starving children speak of the cruelty of poverty. A graduate
in literature, Arpana has, since the start of her art career in the 1970s, been
speaking out on such themes through her paintings, whether it was the 1984 Sikh
riots or the “atrocious condition’ of the widows of Vrindavan. It was only
natural, then, that she was moved to create an installation depicting the
horror of the recent gang rape in Delhi, which
was shown in both Delhi and Kochi this year. “The first time I painted
rape was 33 years ago, about the Maya Tyagi case,” she says. “It was exhibited
at my first solo show and bought by M.F. Husain.”
Her public art — done in places as varied as Bangalore,
Kathmandu and Hamburg,
and in most cases for little or no money — is as famous as her oils. “Very few
people go to galleries,” she says. “Nehru said that one per cent of public
buildings should have art, but that remained on paper.”
But what makes her truly happy is knowing that her paintings are
housed in 12 museum collections all around the world. “I’m crazy about museum
collections!” she says. “They ensure that your work outlives you.”
Arpana Caur’s legacy will most certainly outlive her — not just
her remarkable art work, but her charity work as well, such as the vocational
training institute for women she and her mother run, funded entirely with what
she earns from her paintings. “Thankfully good times have come for artists in
the last 10 to 15 years, so we manage,” she says with a smile.
The exhibition at Gallery Veda is on until May 8.
Keywords: artist
Arpana Caur, art
exhibition
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