Art for God's sake

Gargi Gupta comes across a number of modern artists working with traditional painting techniques and finding a ready market for their works.

Pichwais are a kind of traditional religious painting that form the backdrop to Srinathji, the reigning deity of the Nathdwara temple. Painted traditionally on handmade cloth using gold and stone colours, the painting of pichwais was a form of devotion governed by conventions of colour, proportions, imagery, decoration and so on.

They were painted traditionally by local artists, although lately, spurred by the souvenir-hunting tourist crowd, the painting of pichwais has become something of a cottage industry in this small temple town near Udaipur. Most of what you get is, unfortunately, low on quality, much pared down versions of the rich original, painted with watercolour on paper or cardboard.

Uma Kilachand's pichwais, however, are anything but "" although she isn't either a traditional artist, nor are her paintings, at least in the materials used, traditional. Self-taught, Kilachand came to the image of Srinathji, her family ishtadev, through her grandmother who, she remembers, spent hours feeding the deity, bathing him and adorning him.

It was in 1971, while living abroad, that she first began making images of the deity on petit point. She turned to canvas later, and in 2005 had her first solo exhibition in Mumbai.

That show stirred a lot of enthusiasm among a section of art buyers (primarily top industrial families with roots in Gujarat), and led to many a commission. Last week, she held a sale of 30 of her works, priced between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 9.5 lakh, in Delhi as a fundraiser for Maneka Gandhi's People for Animals.

Clearly, it is not just at the lower end that there is a market for traditional religious art. Rich India, which has been driving up prices of modern art, also has a taste for it "" provided the execution is not slipshod. Kilachand's canvases are painstakingly executed, and take as much as six months to finish.

While her material is acrylic, she uses the dark peacock blues, yellows, reds, greens and golds of the traditional pichwais, along with pearls and Swarovski crystals as embellishment.

She has stuck to the traditional image of the deity and the symbolic elements like lotus and fish, playing around with composition to give her works uniqueness. Kilachand says she is working on petit point again, and her works this time will have real Basra pearls and silks from China.

In the same artistic mould is Veena Singh, who makes Tanjore and Mysore paintings, another style of indigenous painting that's religious in essence and which has gained in popularity in recent years.

Like Kilachand, this Delhi-based artist has no formal training in art but learnt the craft from the masters at Bangalore's Chitra Kala Parishad because, "I wanted a Tanjore, and didn't have the money to buy it!"

Today, Singh's works sell for as much as a couple of lakhs, and her clientele includes politicians like Jaswant Singh, and institutions like ITDC. Singh's distinction is that she makes rare, little-seen paintings from the collections of the maharaja of Mysore, and scours the scriptures to come up with fresh compositions.

Ramesh Gorjala, who recently showed at the Visual Arts Gallery in Delhi, is another of these artists. Born into a Kalamkari artisan family, Gorjala went to art school for a degree in fine arts, consequently his works are a synthesis of traditional art and craft techniques and a contemporary idiom.

Gorjala's subject is the gods and goddesses and stories from Hindu mythology woven around them that his fathers and grandfathers had painted on cloth for the temple. Gorjala uses acrylic on canvas; he fills the canvas with a large principal figure in one strong, sweeping line and then fills it with a profusion of small figures and a multitude of narrative sequences, painted in the traditional style.

What's even more interesting is the finishes Gorjala gets by spreading paint with his fingers and rollering his canvases with patches of watery paint and smudging them with a piece of cloth to give it the kind of uneven, block-printed look associated with Kalamkari.

Jaya Mani, whose Dravidam Gallery in Bangalore has been promoting contemporary artists strongly influenced by the traditional crafts of the region, says Gorjala, like all Kalamkari artists, has a studio and his students and employees fill in the details and the set pieces while he concentrates on the conception and the main figures.

Going by the tremendous response his show generated (prices ranged from Rs 25,000 to Rs 8 lakh), there seem to be many takers for Gorjala's interpretations of Kalamkari.

The other religious painting tradition that has been seeing a revival of sorts recently, backed by demand that's more secular than religious, is the Buddhist thankga. Not that you can have modern thangkas, for the painting of thangkas is bound by rigid rules of what colours to use to represent each element, what cloth to use and how to process it, the exact proportions of figures, how they are to be arranged, etcetera.

So much so that thangka painting is a six year course at the Norbulingka Institute in Dharamsala, which promotes Tibetan arts. But lately a few private studios like the Thangde Gatsal Studio, a venture by Norbulingka-trained master painter, Lobsang Choegyal, have come up, which take up paintings on commission.

Prices, says Choegyal, start from Rs 10,000 and can go up to a couple of lakhs, depending on the size and complexity of the composition. Choegyal's clientele are mostly foreigners and Buddhist institutions, but he also has commissions from individual Indians and corporations like the Mahindra group. As for demand "" Thangde Gatsal Studio's order books are full for the next two years.