Artist Seema Kohli tells simple stories as well as complicated tales that she picks up from her canvases, says Kishore Singh
There are big and small rituals that make up artist Seema Kohli’s life. Such as the layer of silver with which she begins each canvas — it is one of perhaps a dozen washes that will add depth and character to the painting, but it is a practice she will not vary. When she was a child, growing up in a household where no rituals were practiced, she delighted in lighting the lamp when it was time for vespers —even though her father forbade her till he found she had taken to secretly placing the lit flame in her cupboard, and so let her do her bidding for reasons of safety rather than piety.
On her canvases too, the man and the woman she paints fill their days with the rituals of their being. The woman has her pressure cookers and tea sets, the man his books and newspapers; she is rooted by lotus stems in a world of relationships, his is the Sufi quest for human knowledge; she is bound, he is not; when she offers him the apple, is she open to temptation, he to desire? When she paints herself in her own living room, the ritual world of the artist is replaced with the ritual world of the self, with her many books and endless cups of chai and pampered pooch forming the backdrop of the world that Kohli inhabits; in her balcony, to which she sometimes escapes, there is her favourite chair, the open book, the cups of tea, a curling rug…
And yet, her works are philosophically rather than ritually integrated into a world where energy embraces time to be encompassed by space, a world where growth and regeneration happen when man and women come together — as friends or lovers or strangers. Kohli multi-layered canvases constitute an enchanted world of fables, some that she has taken from a created mythology of the present, others that she has reached into the ancient philosophies of even more ancient civilisations to unravel: “I am a communicator,” she says, somewhat abashedly, as if it is something to be ashamed of. For communicate she does, charting a course where even though she stresses a partnership of energies, it is clear that the divine feminine soars above all else, that the woman is the procreator, the infinite beginning of a million stories...
In her recent Swayamsiddha, presented by Galerie Nvya at Lalit Kala Akademi, Kohli is merely extending a repertoire she set in motion when she worked on series on the womb. But those same stories now run into more layers: they reveal, tease, suggest — “all of it subliminally”, insists Kohli — there are her now-familiar drawings, there are the intensely rich, jewel-like, larger-than-life canvases which she stitches together with ideas that explode like an evocation, there are bronze sculptures that intensify her relationship with birth and energy and universality, there is her weaver-bird nest installation where she grapples with the world through the other-world, and there are her films where she repeats the idea of fusion and transformation.
They are big ideas, and you imagine Kohli in her studio, ginger tea cooling in little cups, books unfurling in the ripple of the fan’s breeze, as she creates textures from corrugated paper across the canvas, wondering why she has painted a tree upside down — or is it an inverted image? — for the tree of life that grows roots and leaves, in the literature of the Upanishads, is the tree from which Vedic hymns are suspended like leaves from a peepul tree. “When I paint,” Kohli’s eyes are dark pools in which you can read nothing, “I am in a trance. I don’t know how I will begin, so when I see the finished work, I am amazed at how I got there.”
It is this journey she undertakes ritually several hours every day, several days every week, several weeks every month along a path to self-awareness and self-realisation. The stories she paints, however, seem already self-realised.
