A spiritual, oriental mix

Yuriko Lochan combines Indian aesthetics with Japanese thought

Some artists paint away furiously and can finish a painting from scratch within a few hours. At a private party in New York in March this year, an Indian artist reportedly played gallery to guests and completed a canvas even before they could grab their second drink.

For others such as Yuriko Lochan, a Japanese born New Delhi-based painter, it's a long stretch from the time the images settle on the mind to germinate to when she actually starts harvesting those ideas with an easel and brush on a shikishi board (a Japanese paper drawing board).

"Sometimes you get a chance to see something that remains in your heart. It enters the system and takes time to form those images," says Lochan.

Sometimes, then, you can get to the heart of Lochan's paintings by simply searching for clues to her artistic sensibilities. Born in Osaka, Japan in 1962, she is at home in New Delhi since 1987 where she lives with her artist husband Rajeev Lochan, an artist and currently the head of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

She is a woman of few words but is even slower when it comes to productivity; she produces not more than eight paintings a year even as she writes for several Japanese publications on art and design.

She predominantly works in water colour on shikishi. In short, she straddles the cultures of both India and Japan, and many of her works are encounters of images she experiences in these two lands.

In essence, says Lochan, her works are about nature and attempts to represent its spiritual calmness. "It has never been something that goes against it. I try to create expressions which are natural," she says.

Water, earth, air and flowers are the iconic elements that recur in her work. "But painting lotuses do not make it a painting. It is a clue to a concept to expand on," she adds.

Lochan, who secured her masters in oil painting from the Kyoto City University of Arts in Kyoto, had executed a mass of experimental art in brass, wood and even dabbled in modern installation art in the mid-eighties: "At that time, installation art was non-existent in India but quite popular in Japan. When I arrived here, I thought it was not appropriate to do it at that time."

Instead, Lochan began to paint with gansai, a mineral stone colour used in Japanese paintings, and did a series on Indian goddesses using the material.

"I was attracted to gansai because it is a natural substance. But because the climate here is dry and unsuitable, I couldn't continue using it," she says.

But what primarily fascinates Lochan is to present the world in a horizon-like expanse with abstract, roving view points, and sometimes throw impressions of looking at the world through a cave.

Her series titled "Pancha Tattva" and "Darpan" are interplays of space, of earth and water with an atlas-like persperctive.

While Lochan continues taking trips to the ancient city of Nara in western Japan to sketch lotuses, her "Apsara" series was inspired by a visit to a museum in Mathura. "I saw these small figurines of women with floral headgear," she says.

The upshot was a series of works of delicate faces of women crowned with local seasonal flowers such as gulmohur, madhav-malti and amaltas. "It was after a dust storm in Delhi that I saw a broken branch of an amaltas tree lying on the road. After several days, I saw that the flowers were still blooming. It showed the power of nature," she says.

Most of Lochan's works are with private collectors, corporate houses and hotels. Says Renu George, gallerist of Bangalore-based Time & Space gallery, "Lochan has a deep understanding of oriental essence and has an exquisite style of spiritual representation."

As for Lochan, she says, "I see the world around me with an artist's eye, which in practise has taken me many years to realise."