Touring Mindscapes

“I often start with an inspiration from nature. The concept comes into being as a landscape but its spirit is evoked when eventually,naturally,the abstract elements come in,” says Tathe. To make one understand his concepts better,Tathe takes one for a ride to his formative years as a painter. “When I was studying in art school,I dabbled with realism and painted landscapes,” says Tathe,adding “The mediums I used at that time were watercolours and oil paints. While the former allowed for transparency,the latter could be used to achieve opacity. Then,a new set of acrylic paints were introduced in the market,which allowed an artist to render both transparency and opacity. That was a revelation to me. It was also the time in my life when I started reading philosophy,history and ideology,and my readings injected the abstract into my realistic works.”

Nitin Ghanrekar,another artist exhibiting his works at the show,says,“I was traversing the breadth of south India when I came across maths,which impart education in the gurukul tradition,” says Ghanrekar,adding,“The students,upon reaching adolescence,come to these maths for vedic studies. The playfulness of these children and the overall ambience of these gurukuls inspired me to embark on the ‘Gurukul Boys’ series.”

Ghanrekar’s acrylic-on-canvas paintings are stylistically unique. He employs bright colours to portray the playfulness of young boys and the subjects have been rendered as caricatures. “I was trying to develop a style of my own. I had made sketches on-the-spot and clicked photographs,which were later converted into paintings. Some are products of my imagination,like Gurukul Boys Performing Aarti of Beloved Shrinathji,in which the skin tone of the deity and the boys is the same,symbolising a merger,” says Ghanrekar. He adds,“The other work,Gurukul Boys Enjoying Melodious Tunes with Peacocks in the Banana Garden,is based on something I had witnessed at Raman Maharishi Ashram in Tamil Nadu.”

There are also works by Umakanth Kannade,who has used the hatching technique with the help of a crowquill (quill pen) to portray birds in wilderness. According to Kannade,the use of crowquill is rare and is perhaps used only by four artists in the country. “I first primer the canvas with white acrylic paint and then draw on it using the quill pen,” he says.

Kannade’s 2 X 4 feet paintings take about 150 hours to finish,as the technique he employs is tedious. “I have perfected the use of crowquill over the past 15 years. The instrument is very sensitive and produces bolder lines,the harder one presses the nib against the surface. I then use the hatching technique to render my subjects and one could find up to 10 tones of black in my works,achieved solely using the pen,which is a feat,considering most people can get about 50 tones out of red,” says Kannade.