Raging against the tide

Even as he transits from "prose to poetry", Ashok Bhowmick is in no hurry to become famous.

FFor a painter, it's incredibly easy to speak to Ashok Bhowmick about literature, Hindi poetry, theatre even. Or the politics of relevance. About the play of the market and why form and content should be the criterion for judging art, not the price that determines the hierarchy of artists.

Hmm, you can't help telling him, so you're a political commentator. "I believe in certain ideologies," he duels back, "I believe in a unified society not sundered by disparities. Which is why I mock at riches and kings in my paintings and make the common man's desires my subjects." And then, for good measure, "I find my canvases are talking less now, moving from prose to poetry."

For an artist who counts "poets and writers, not artists, among my friends", Bhowmick has had a slow coming out. His namesake, in Kolkata, is considerably better established, and for a while this Bhowmick too lived in Kolkata without liking it too much because of its "terror tactics against outsiders" he grins, "even though I am Bengali".

A student of botany, a representative of a pharmaceutical company and a few years with Bharatiya Gyanpeeth may not sound like the ideal breeding ground for any artist, but Bhow-mick says in 1974 (when he held his first exhibition in Kanpur, selling only one work "" for Rs 500) there was no money to be had in art. "A few critics would come for the opening, you got written about, but even survival money was difficult to find."

Even though he has been painting "every day" since 1991, it was only a few years ago that he quit working for the job of a full time artist, having shifted to the "rude city" of Delhi, where he has a residence as well as a studio in which he often spends nights, days, weeks.

It is here, amidst his books and his paints, that he has manoeuvred a shift from the paper works with which he became identified to acrylics on canvas. Yet, the transition "" first from black and white drawing to colour, and now from paper to canvas "" has been seamless, his leitmotif the cross-hatching style of using pen and ink over paint to draw thousands of lines that "create areas of light and dark", he says.

A medium of illustrators ""he credits Mario Miranda and Milon Banerjee for helping him hone his technique "" it has been used by F N Souza and Jogen Chowdhury. "But I have also been influenced," says Bhowmick, whose 10-year retrospective opens today at Kumar Art Gallery in New Delhi, "by Rabindranath Tagore but not," he smiles, "by Jamini Roy."

Not only have his canvases grown larger, he is now also experimenting with flat colours next to his cross-hatchings, so the watercolour-like quality of his paper works is of the past, as are subjects like the street children he painted so passionately. "I am," reflects Bhowmick, "looking at a more spiritual context" "" manifest in his current series on the bull. "That is another reason

I need larger canvases," he explains, "to contain the rage of the bull."

With paper works that command a high of Rs 2.5 lakh and canvases priced at twice that, Bhowmick may stand alienated from market forces, but he says he enjoys a discussion with "art lovers rather than art collectors" "" something that is becoming increasingly difficult as art lovers become art collectors.