| At a time when any association of art is simultaneously with wealth, it might seem inappropriate, or perhaps even astounding, to talk about the economies earlier artists practiced as a routine. |
| They drew on paper, turned it over and drew on it all over again. They doodled on envelopes and invitation cards. And some, like J Sultan Ali, drew on the printed pages and advertisements in magazines. |
| Not that Ali was poor or, by today's standards, poor enough. He came from a family of modest businessmen, and so it must have been a wrench when, in the 1940s, he joined the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Madras. |
| His mastery of artistic techniques, however, was abandoned soon enough in favour of more spontaneous, almost tribal-like art, which he discovered when he began teaching children how to draw. |
| Roobina Karode, curator of a show of drawings by 12 artists, currently on at the Delhi Art Gallery in New Delhi, observes: "Ali became deeply involved in the mechanics of the medium, paying attention to both craftsmanship and the creative potential of drawing. Gradually, he arrived at the simultaneous acts of scripting and drawing that led to the aesthetic demand of interweaving text and image." |
| His touch is light, and often it is difficult to tell if the printed text on a magazine page is original or his creation. Much of his mythic work was centred on "the cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil", notes Amita Jhaveri in her book, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists. His use of the bull and other seals unearthed in the excavations of Harappa and |
| Mohenjodaro was a logical extension of this thought. Here was primal art against which he interposed his own figures and created works that could be humorous or horrific "" or both. Blended with vernacular script, they became works of multiple dimensions. |
| Professionally, Ali was a tour de force in the capital, and went on to become exhibitions director at Lalit Kala Akademi. Later, he moved back to Chennai, to settle at the arts village Cholamandalam near the sea, on the road to Mahabalipuram. |
| Here, his work rescinded into a simpler, more organic form "" more drawing than painting. Slowly, he began to shed colour and texture in favour of the energy of the raw line. |
| By now, even the mythic animals on his canvases had been replaced by tantric forms. His engagement from illustration to textured art to drawing was indeed complete by the time he died in 1990. |
| Or, as a recent visitor to the Delhi Art Gallery more sagely put his work in a contemporary context, "He would have made a great tattooist!" |
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