An eye for words

A recent publication reveals veteran artist K G Subramanyan to be as much a master of words as he is of line and colour.

K G Subramanyan (Mani-da to his many acolytes at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan and Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda where he taught for many years) is one of the last of the pioneering geniuses of contemporary Indian art, a man whose ideas and sensibility, manifested through both his work and his teaching, forged a vocabulary, and laid the aesthetic and intellectual underpinning for the present generation of artists "" their soaring prices and increasing estimation in international circles being a testimony to his success.

A complete artist in the mould of, say Abanindranath Tagore, Subramanyan is, besides a painter, sculptor, muralist, also an art theoretician and historian.

Wielding the pen with as much felicity as he does the brush, he has written discursive essays on various aspects of contemporary Indian art as also poetry and delightfully whimsical stories for children.

Some of the latter, a few letters and an essay, have been brought together by Seagull in a publication titled The Magic of Making, a catalogue really to accompany its large travelling exhibition of the veteran painter's works which has now made its way to Delhi.

There are around 320 paintings, charcoal and gouache on paper and acrylic on canvas, 120 of them executed by the 82-year-old in the past year, along with some black and white studies from an earlier sketchbook.

The artworks, especially the sketches of sundry animals (goats, monkeys, horses, cats have always been Subramanyan's favourites) bespeak his mastery of his craft (there's something about the assured precision of his lines, flowing freely and almost randomly, that's reminiscent of the "calligraphic" style of his teacher, Benodebehari Mukherjee).

But it is Subramanyan's writings that are a revelation. Insightful, lucid, profound, he reveals a visual, metaphorical bent that's very high Santiniketan, very Tagoresque, in its tone.

The Purvapalli sonnets (Three spacy rooms. An open verandah,/ Facing the eastern sky. Where you could sit/ And watch the world around and slowly draw...) are an ode as much to the sylvan little university town Tagore created as to the many artists who learnt and honed their art there.

But it's "The Magic of Making", a 1989 essay that's reproduced here, that's significant because it can be read as a key to Subramanyan's art, indeed, his entire career. The essay articulates all the principal tenets of his art practice and beliefs, for example, his collapsing of the barriers between the artist and the artisan.

"Art (or the ability to make things) is, therefore, not there to be borne as a burden. It is there to unfold a vision....Jethabai's bavsi (ritual terracotta) is an instance of the former; Donattela's Guatamelata of the latter. Each is valid and exciting in its own way, representing 'horse and rider' differently."

The following tract can be read as an elucidation of the artist's way of "seeing" "" "Our eyes, hands, minds, all muddle through in their separate ways and make these curious composites. Strangely enough, it is the muddling that moves the vision forward. From simple form to the more complicated; from distant suggestion to verisimilitude; from visual make-believe to visual metaphor."

Indeed, The Magic of Making today reads as something of a manifesto for Indian art, as it is and as it should be. It is the voice of sanity, more precious for being old-fashioned, that's all but dying out as Indian art becomes mired in big bucks. It's a voice that many of the young artists who're starting to make a name for themselves would do well to heed.