I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree...
This thoughtful declaration by American poet Joyce Kilmer is an eternal truth. Holding the ground in place, offering up luscious fruit and cleaning the air we breathe, trees represent life and stability. Recognising their crucial contribution to the life cycle, artist Preetha Kannan has made trees the subject of her first solo exhibition, “Gaia”, launching in Mumbai on December 17.
According to Preetha, “Gaia”, the Greek word for the Earth goddess, is a fine balance of five elements: Land, air, water, fire and sky. This show concentrates on “land”, and four future shows will focus on each of the remaining elements. Preetha chose trees to express the idea of “land”. Just as Romantic poets like Wordsworth were driven to write about Nature when industrialisation stripped bare their beloved countryside and replaced men with machines, today’s industrialised world seems to inspire in Preetha a reverential appreciation for these sentinels of balance and life.
The show features paintings that are mostly 3 x 4 ft in size. The centrepiece of this show, however, is a massive painting, 42 ft long and 6.5 ft high. A thicket of trees form a wide facade, and invite viewers to enter their green-yellow depths. Created in three separate panels over a year of hard labour, this huge work is inspired by Monet’s famous Water Lilies. “It’s a fabulous feeling to envision and attempt something like this. It’s also very hard to execute,” says Preetha.
While the painting is huge, at its basic level there are countless little dots that make up the overall effect, all in related colours — shades of green and yellow. Though this may seem a hat-tip to Pointillism and Seurat’s work in the Divisionistic genre, Preetha actually uses the dots as an echo of modern technology, where all visuals are made up of pixels.
The dots create a tantalising three-dimensional effect, so that the dominating colour changes as the viewer shifts her gaze, leading to the illusion that one could, if one so wished, just walk into the greenery.
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It’s ironic that the space where Preetha created this painting was a metal works factory. The video that plays at the exhibition juxtaposes the stark grey of the factory with arresting splashes of green and yellow as she works. As an oasis of life and colour in what seems to be a metallic jungle, the painting reminds us what our world is in danger of becoming, and what is keeping it beautiful.
(December 17-23 at Jehangir Art Gallery, and December 24-January 8 at Gallery Beyond, SBS Marg, Fort)