Shy, almost smiling, Charumati Nirwan's charcoal drawings of tigers are gently comforting, a far cry from the fierce creatures in the wild. "I always look for handsome tigers to draw," chuckles the artist. "I wouldn't have them snarling or looking menacing. I suppose it's a reflection of myself."
Larger-than-life, faintly menacing paintings of tigers and stuffed animals have long adorned the walls of palaces and mansions. But these majestic animals have now taken on a delicate and vulnerable aspect on the canvases of Nirwan and a few other artists and students of the Ranthambhore School of Art and Wildlife Conservation Society. The artists are doing their bit to promote wildlife conservation; most recently though an art exhibition in the capital.
For these artists, it has been a journey to find nuances of the animal that run parallel to the alarming decrease in their number. Komala Varadan, a Bharatnatyam exponent, choreographer, photographer, author and artist, has taken time out to capture animals on camera.
"In the name of development, the richness of our surroundings has been sacrificed," she says. Her photographs of tigers and other animals taken 25 years ago in Ranthambhore and Kaziranga afford a glimpse of a more populous forest.
"We were able to spot tigers easily at that time," Varadan says. Seen in juxtaposition with other, more recent works at the exhibition which show a much bleaker landscape, they tell the story of the dwindling numbers of wildlife in India.
It's a great loss to these artists that one is not allowed to explore the forest on foot anymore. Most of them have had to, therefore, use photographs as a guiding tool. And Ranthambhore, dotted with ruins and little lakes, with tigers sometimes resting in chattris, has provided an interesting background.
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"Every year, we teach almost 400 people of the area how to make a living out of arts and crafts related to wildlife and the tiger, and sell them to tourists," says
M D Parashar, founder of the Ranthambhore School of Art and Wildlife Conservation Society. "The module has been working very well," he says confidently, and the villages around the sanctuary have been successful in attaining self-sufficiency through art.
The artist and photographer has developed a style to suit the natives of the area, for the cause goes beyond using sophisticated art materials. Parashar's own work has travelled across the country and round the globe. Their contribution to Save The Tiger campaign has not gone unnoticed too.
"Valmik Thapar advised me to help in ways other than contributing money. After one of my earlier exhibitions, I used a part of my earnings to make postcards to be given out. I'm currently working on a calendar," says Charumati, who showed her work in the capital a few months ago.
She is one of many who has adopted shades of grey to depict the wild. Parashar's work, also in black and white, is not a photograph as one might be fooled into believing; the whiskers of the tiger that stand out are not strokes, but perfectly and delicately placed blank spaces.
A few artists also make use of abstraction, cleverly playing on the stripes motif so that now you see three tigers and now you see one (Ram Sahay Meena's "Three Eyes"). As art critic Suneet Chopra writes in the catalogue, "The artists have succeeded in evoking the spiritual qualities of the animal without relying on either traditional symbolism or divine attributes." With a certain contemporaniety, he says, they have entered into the world of art as investment.
It's definitely not a shot in the dark.
