In quest of formlessness

Artist Prabhakar Kolte staunchly dismisses even remote resemblances to known forms in his abstracts where the paint drips as a signature style.

Prabhakar Mahadeo Kolte rattles off the names of all his teachers who initiated him into painting and subsequently influenced his art, ever since he was in kindergarten.

"I am not a born artist", says Kolte, "I learnt art from my teachers," he adds.

Ironically, Kolte, an abstract painter in search of the formless form, had his first stint with painting copying images from calendars. Imitating his uncle who painted from calendars, Kolte recalls thinking of his uncle's talent as magical.

"You'll come to know how to do it," his uncle assured him, and Kolte would spend hours doing the same, trying to make an exact copy.

During his art education at the JJ School of Arts in Mumbai, the student-artist studied art with the clear notion that he was learning the alphabets of a language, and just being able to form a sentence was not his literature. When fellow artists painted landscapes on outdoor trips, Kolte found it difficult to take out his brush to paint.

"At a waterfall once, I had a bath while my classmates painted it, and I felt funny as I thought that I was not serious about my art," says Kolte.

He decided to shun his inhibitions with the tried and tested philosophy "" unless you experience life, you cannot do art. "I thought," says Kolte, "my technique may be weak but my thoughts were on the right track."

He also questioned the copying of images from tangible forms and decided never to do it for his artworks.

"It should be my picture," he decided. So while Kolte paints his abstracts by instinct, he would deliberately cover up any identifiable image by wiping it, to make it as formless as possible. "So much so that wiping has become my painting," says Kolte.

The artist also recalls his dilemma of choosing a subject at a time he had decided to reject the world as we know it. "Everything in its core form is formless," philosophises Kolte.

"I am not interested in forms, it's the formless that interests me." So Kolte's images at one glance look like blotches of acrylic or watercolour in dominantly dark tones, sometimes bright, but always with peeping streaks of lighter tones.

The formless forms, unassumingly geometric at times, still show evidence of a canvas possessed with Kolte's passion "" dripping paint. He tried oils too, but the medium's temperament did not gel with the wateriness that he sought. So, later, he took to diluted acrylics on a vertical canvas (with water as base) that has the ability to drip.

Though a phase starting in the mid 1990's till early 2000 depicts extremely dark and brooding tones on Kolte's canvases, he is quick to dismiss that these colour transitions were pre-planned. What he does admit, though, is that they are indicative of personal trials "" "It's (painting) a monologue," he says, and "if it connects with people then I have accomplished something," Kolte says.

Tracing his own transition in the philosophy of painting, Kolte is more precise. In 1978, he believed the human mind to be a mini cosmos where the art of remaining childlike was fundamental to art.

By 1983, he had changed: "My thinking should govern the scene I paint," he recalls thinking, dismissing anything associated with a fixed thought.

For him, it was his own perception "" like a colour box being a rainbow. A decade later, in 1993, his thinking had changed some more, to the belief that nature was first created and then looked the way it does. So, "I paint first and see later"; hoping it will better develop his seeing capabilities.

Sometime soon in the future, Kolte is sure that he will undergo another change in philosophy. "I can sense it," he says, "though I don't know what the change will bring."

With a 22-year stint as faculty at the JJ School of Arts, Kolte feels newcomers lack the determination and commitment that marked art in his hey days.

"They can get everything without much hardship", he says, buts insists it's only a passing phase.