The evolution of Broota

His Scratch technique distinguishes his work

Like journalists, artists are vanishing from the city on sponsored trips. As demand for art grows, gallerists find it tough these days to secure work first-hand from the overbooked artists.

Art camps are being organised in exotic locales such as China, Turkey, Burma, Portugal, Kenya, South Africa and even Angkor Vat. In exchange for the expenses born out by a gallerist or a corporate house, the artists offer a work or two for free.

This summer, however, senior artist Rameshwar Broota says he's quite happy to stay back in his SOHO in Delhi's Josef Stein-designed Triveni Kala Sangam, where he's been living and teaching in the art department for the last three decades.

"I've only accepted a 15-day trip to the US and China this year. I don't like to perform under pressure since I work on wall-size canvases. As a rule, I never do commissioned work, and I am a terribly slow painter," he explains.

Sixty-four-year-old Broota, famed for his scratch paintings, part-photographer, sometime-filmmaker but a thorough computer geek, sits surrounded by three Macintosh computers, where he morphs the images of his photographs with his paintings for his upcoming photography exhibition.

But he decides not to take aid of the machine and does a mental back-of-the-envelope calculation on his productivity.

"I have completed not more than 100 paintings in the past three decades," he mumbles. Of these, nearly 15 are with Indian art collector Kito Boer, the McKinsey head in the Middle East; the rest are in the Herwitz collection, in museums and with other collectors.

In Broota's work, you can see both the evolution of the man as an artist as well as the portraits of his men. Never been drawn to the female form, he painted his "Gorilla series", a satire on society where the Man is represented as the less-evolved sapien, between the seventies and eighties.

"But you can't have localised interest always and must have a universal symbol," he says.

As the cunning apes become extinct from his work, the "Man series" dominates his work between the 1980s and 1990s. This was just before he discovered his "scratch" technique in the summer of 1979.

In his frustration to complete work one night, he coloured his canvas black and began scratching figures out with the end of a Prabhat blade ("The blade must be breakable and not good for shaving."). "Before I knew it, the painting was complete," he says.

While Broota hasn't used a sketch and pencil in two decades and uses the blade as a brush directly on the canvas, the creative process always begins after taking several photo shots, followed by a rigorous selection and cropping process to define the visual parameters. With photographic reference, he then begins to scratch draw in his cave-style technique.

While he has maintained he's interested in the forms and textures of the human body, there can't be any room for vagueness. "It has to be precise. I am interested in blowing up a small part of the body into dramatic proportions. It gives an expression of life itself," he says.

Some critics say Broota's work has a morbid edge. His defense is a subject can never be too illustrative; it will repulse the viewer by its scale of beauty or vulgarity.

"Direct interpretation is exploitive. A painting must have an identity, something to discover every day."