Acrylic addiction

The maverick Shridhar Iyer doesn't bathe or comb for months altogether in pursuit of the perfect canvas.

Shridhar Iyer does the purification ritual before he starts work on a canvas "" sprinkling Gangajal, flowers and sometimes even earth over it.

"Painting for me is very devotional," says the artist from Bhopal who then lets the flowers stick to the canvas: "I let them blend." Confessing his ignorance about art till he stumbled into discovering it at Bharat Bhavan in the early 1980s as as a volunteer there.

"[J] Swaminathan and the whole atmosphere of Bharat Bhavan charged with art, culture and other performing arts attracted me," and Shridhar abandoned his study of law to discover himself and his art. Ironically, the whitewashing of Bharat Bhavan during that time transfixed him, and to date he has had a love affair with acrylic as a medium on canvas.

Abstraction fascinates Shridhar, a defining aspect of his works "" figurative art, he sneers, is merely an echo of what has already been seen.

"Abstract gives freedom, it has no boundaries of form and colour," he reasons. Yet, the figurative and the abstract are not two separate entities and their amalgamation and conversation create endless energy.

The restlessness in his works Shridhar attributes it to his quest as a traveller still searching for a destination, as seen in his recent works titled

'Jatra: A procession of colours, lines and images'. Raw forms attract him (he confesses an addiction to bitter, raw coffee powder that he eats). "In a raw state, everything emanates strength. There is bhakti involved in it, and my works involve a lot of energy."

He feels he has an unusual relationship with geometry; the relation of different geometrical figures with each other, their reactions, find their way to his canvas, sculptures and installations.

"Nature in geometry has boundaries but nature itself is without boundaries," so Shridhar finds his muse in surrounding objects "" stones, the Ganga, insects... "I blend into the surroundings that inspire me, and they reflect in my work."

He comes across as a person of extremes. In a philosophical mood, he says there's just black and white in the world. "It's just the two colours; the other colours fall somewhere in between."

A person of great extremes, in a moment of candour he confesses there are occasions when he does not bathe for up to four months, or run a comb through his dreadlocks for even longer spells (he's held out for eight months currently). His "not so conventional ways" can imply high levels of energy (once painting a 135 feet installation wall in two hours flat).

Paints, buckets of them, have been spilled over by Shridhar, for him to roll in the spill. "I love the smell of paint," he says, adding that he realises that yellow has started emerging dominantly on his canvas along with bold reds and blacks.

The first stroke of a brush dipped in paint is enough to lure him to the canvas. Abrupt, short brushstrokes make up elements of "masti and bindasi" for him.

Painting is akin to engaging in a trance-like state, something he relates to his childhood when he would weave flower garlands for his priest father's puja.

"The intense concentration with which I wove the garlands seem to surface when I work on art," he says, and the gods and goddesses of those childhood pujas manifest as his abstracts. Sadhu or painter? Your guess is as good as mine.