Grassroots artist

Mahendra Solanki's oeuvre of collages made from vegetation have remained unchanged

In a childhood spent in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh, where most children played gilli-danda or cricket, Mahendra Singh Solanki collected grasses and twigs, leaves and bark.

His family might have thought his inclination to study nature at such close quarters might imply an interest in medicine, perhaps even horticulture, but Solanki's drift was aimed at more creative pursuits.

He would match flower petals with coconut shells, combining all that nature discarded into a jigsaw of textures and images, shapes and silhouettes.

Two decades later, Solanki's still doing that. Only, people are now paying to buy his collages. Few artists can claim to have retained their childhood interests for so long, but Solanki "" despite a degree from Baroda's M S University "" has remained steadfast in his interest.

"Natural materials give me such a range of mediums, of textures," he says at his first exhibition in Delhi "" he's had three in Mumbai "" "that I've never felt the need to work with paper."

He does watercolours though to break the tedium of collecting, drying, pressing, placing together, then pasting and brushing or spraying poly-urethane over the result, to create a uniform texture, the entire thing framed into a work of art.

"Dewas is almost rural," he explains, "and this use of nature's materials feels right for me because it has the same texture as their mud huts, their homes.

Villagers don't distort nature, and I feel I can express myself better when I work with this medium." Not that he's seeking their approval; though their understanding is encouraging to him as an artist.

Solanki says he's trained to observe folk art as closely as he does landscapes, and thinks he might have been influenced in subconscious form by the "mandana" or wall paintings of the houses of the Malwa region of his home state.

"But the land gives them enough," he says of the people there, "so their mandana tends to be minimal "" not perhaps as an expression of their aesthetics but because of creative laziness. They daub the walls a bit and say, okay, that's it, it's done," he smiles.

His work does not have that minimalism, even though the expressions are spartan.

Much of the work is abstract, but every once in a while the huddle of village roofs in a valley, or figures walking through a forest, will form on the canvas "" hinted at rather than obvious, and scaled to a size that lets nature overpower all mankind.

There's a lot Solanki has on his anvil. He'd like to work on larger canvases, for example, something that would scare him earlier. "But once you overcome your fear of failure, the larger scale is more interesting," he explains.

Then, he'd like to examine the countryside in Maharashtra "" he shifted to Mumbai a year-and-a-half ago. Eventually, he'd like to learn how artists in Rajasthan's ateliers used methods of natural preservation, and use it in his own work, replacing the PU with which he layers his collages.

"Maybe it was wax," he ponders, "I'm not sure, but whatever it was, it was very good."

Solanki doesn't know most of his collectors, and thinks a good deal of his work has gone out of the country anyway. Showing in Delhi till the end of this month, he won't hang around for long though.

There's all that grass to collect, all those leaves to find, all those flowers to press, before his day's work is done.