Thirty years in the life of an artist

Kanchan Chander shares her works with a supportive audience.

She isn't self-effacing but keeps a low profile, nor is she a feminist, but is drawn to issues of feminism. "I'm concerned with issues that deal with women," she concurs. Kanchan Chander's canvases are drawn from the world of women all right, a form she says that has taken shape over the years.

A familiar face on the art circuit in Delhi, and till recently a lecturer at the College of Art in the capital, Chander's exhibition that opens this evening at the Visual Arts Gallery and then moves to the Delhi Art Gallery next month, is a solo showing after a long time, but what's unusual is that it is a retrospective of three decades of her life as an artist.

It also coincides with the launch of a book by DAG, Kanchan, The Story So Far, that studies aspects of her work from 1976 to 2006, with essays by Roobina Karode, Michael Ludgrove, Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker and Geeti Sen.

Chander's paintings may surprise many, even though she has been painting for well over a decade now, because she found her first calling as a printmaker. At a time when younger artists wanted to contribute to the accessibility of art through the medium of prints, Chander's contribution to the whole gamut of lithographs and etchings was laudatory.

Most artists moved on soon enough to more remunerative mediums, but it was only in 1993-94 that Chander moved on ("back", she says) to the world of painting. "Prints have their own charm, but they're time consuming," she says. "I had old parents to look after, a young child, and a full-time job, so I switched to painting." Still, she hopes she will get back to it some time.

If her early works are invested with a dark and sombre quality, her recent paintings tend to be provocative.

"Over the years, her artistic expression has grown bold, literal, metaphoric and witty where celebratory acts of womanhood have taken centre stage," writes Roobina Karode in the book.

Those familiar with Chander's work will recall the evolving female form as her signature style. "I shifted from drawing the full figure to just the torso because I didn't want to identify the subject," she explains.

"And the female torso is global, and it's beautiful." Observes Karode, "As a lone triumphant symbol rising above the horizon in successive canvases, the torso marks a celebration of female heroism."

For Chander, the evolving form is also closely linked to her own life. "Much of her art is extrapolated from her lived experience," says Karode. Initially, Chander decorated the female form of the torso with lotus flowers, and later with beads and sequins.

"The latest," she says, "is the creation of a dual personality, not exactly an ardhanarishwar, but where a woman has to do a man's jobs, such as handling the mechanic, or the plumber" "" indicated through a layering of electrical and motor parts.

"A man too does a woman's jobs," she hastens to correct the perspective, "such as changing nappies..." Chander switched from prints to painting because "it was easier with a small child", and quit teaching art to focus on her own work.

Still, she isn't enamoured of the market economics, of the steep escalations in price, of the wonder of artists producing multiple shows a year, when it takes at least two for most to produce just one show.

"The prices will fall," she says in a doomsday forecaster's voice. But that's one time her collectors and gallerists and even friends will disagree with her.