Artist Amit Ambalal strives to retain the fun element in all his works, breaking away from the conventions of high art.
Crows hold an abiding fascination for Amit Ambalal. They are the only distraction allowed into his studio, an 18th century haveli from the walled city that the artist has reconstructed within the compound of his house in Ahmedabad.
“I strew peanuts to attract the birds. They play, they make sounds, they communicate, as if to say ‘here I am’. For me, they are like humans; I use them as a metaphor for human situations,” says the veteran painter who is showing around 35 sculptures of crows at his solo exhibition at Delhi’s Gallery Espace.
Ambalal is an incidental sculptor; he says he plays around with wax or papier-mâché or whatever is near at hand, turning around the image in his mind.
One or two of these pieces have made it into Ambalal’s shows, but last June, he showed a more ambitious collection — 80 sculptures of crows as a site specific installation at the Ahmedabad Textile Manufacturers’ building designed by the celebrated French architect, Le Corbusier — whose name, incidentally, means the crow-like one!
The selection at Espace has 35 of these. Cast in bronze and some in fibre glass, Ambalal’s crows are life-sized models ...nay caricatures whose rough and craggy lines convey an impression of “crowness” in a way that more faithful, realistic representations do not, an impression that’s reinforced by the way they are arranged in groups like you see them out on the streets — squabbling, rooting for food, strutting warily near an attractive morsel, poised for flight at the slightest hint of danger.
The crows may be an especial favourite, but animals of all kinds — cows, dogs, monkeys, storks, lizards (of various species and sizes), snakes, fish and even tortoises — regularly make their appearance in Ambalal’s canvases.
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Like the crow sculptures, they sometimes work as embodiments of qualities that we normally associate with humans like evil or menace or cunning or greed or goodness or innocence, and also sometimes as mute, unwitting spectators of human folly and vanity.
As Gayatri Sinha writes in her handsomely mounted monograph on the artist published to coincide with the show, they evoke a “world of alternative wisdoms, of folk stories and Hindu Puranic myths, where human and bestial characters become interchangeable”.
Take any of the paintings at the show — “Pee Cow”, where a florid red cow urinates into a pond catching a tortoise swimming below the surface of the water in its stream, while a second tortoise suckles its udders and a third is caressed by its tongue — to see how Ambalal weaves his particular world of fancy.
Some of it, of course, comes from the Nathdwara pichwais, which Ambalal is something of an authority on. He is the author of Krishna as Srinathji, a seminal study of the Nathdwara paintings published in 1987, the fruit of years of collecting pichwais, interacting with Pushti Marga devotees who run the temple and researching the philosophy and aesthetics of the paintings.
A sense of magic, what Ambalal calls “anubhuti, inner experience which is internalised, brining the painting alive”, is something that he seeks consciously to bring about.
That he’s untutored largely also has something to do with the rough, sometimes naive quality of his art.
The scion of a family that owned textile factories in Ahmedabad, Ambalal sold off his mills in 1979 to become a painter full-time. It wasn’t such a bad time to sell and Ambalal seems to have got a reasonable price for the mills which left him “free to do as I liked, so I could do non-artistic art”. His friends mocked him then, and it took him a long time to get accepted in art circles, but “now they ask me what my calculation was”, laughs Ambalal.
The influence of Bali, which Ambalal has now visited thrice, is an important one in this suite of paintings. Talking of Bali, Ambalal says, “I felt I was entering an Ajanta painting, the Vedic past where humans and nature were so much a part of each other.”
But Ambalal is no “realistic” painter, the objective experience to him is only the starting point — “it is the nucleus and it (the final painting) is transformed by my memories, by what I read and my conversations with friends.”
It’s a process of dislocation, brought to life by the artist’s sense of the absurdity of most human interactions, of life itself. Indeed, it’s this satiric vision, or what the artist calls “an element of fun”, that’s Ambalal’s signature, his distinctive voice that makes him stand out in today’s art world.
“I usually have an imaginary viewer,” says the artist, “it could be anyone — you, or Atul (Dodiya) or Bhupen (Khakhar, another long-time friend) who says don’t do this, it is becoming serious art. The fun element in my paintings is meant to break that boring, serious high art. If I feel it is going towards the artistic, I destroy it...I don’t allow it enter into that category.”
Ambalal’s artistic creed is simple. “I am an entertainer. Ultimately I am going to show what I’m doing to the outside world. The viewer who comes to my show should be happy; I don’t want to create tension,” he says.