Straight from the Gut

There are others like him to whom art is best described as a slightly painful love affair. Single and focused to the point of obsession, these artists are tenacious and reclusive and often find themselves going against the grain.

In suburban Kandivli, 29-year-old Justin Ponmany, a mixed media painter, took seven years before he decided to have a solo. After a sell-out at Sakshi Art Gallery in Central Mumbai, he’s expanded his studio space. The frat air of the flat is gone, along with the others who shared his studio. Now he is waiting for the urge to mount a 16-foot canvas on a stretcher and begin his new body of work.

‘‘I’m raring to have a go at some large works. But I need to put a couple of things in place because my pre-painting process takes extensive time,’’ says the artist, who works with photocopied photographs transferred to canvas and layers of flat colours. Meanwhile, he’s experimenting with holograms on smaller canvases. ‘‘I find the synthetic nature of this pigment enables me to explore my preoccupation with plastic and plasticisation. Also, it’s at once real and unreal (virtual),’’ says Ponmany, who is both fascinated and repulsed by the human ability to turn everything to plastic.

At 35, abstract painter Sheetal Gattani is yet to get her fill of the square as a format. She always works on imported blackboard paper and can never decide if the painting is going to be horizontal or vertical. ‘‘If it’s square, everything is uniformly distributed,’’ says Gattani.

Furiously applying coat upon coat of poster colours, she ‘invents’ her hues. A yellowish-greenish brown or a blackish-purplish blue. ‘‘I don’t use a conventional palette. I like to spread my colours out on the floor,’’ says Gattani, who covers the floor of her Marine Lines studio in Mumbai with plastic sheets so she can use the entire space. Often, she works until the paper gives way to her persuasion, peeling away to reveal broken fibres. Many works are rejected in this process. ‘‘It’s not until I have reached ‘my level’ of satisfaction that I show it to anybody,’’ says the artist, who sometimes teaches art at a girl’s school in the city.

“It’s appalling when people ask me for a painting to go with their upholstery,’’ says Gattani. Earlier, it used to upset her but now she tells them: ‘‘You should change the colour scheme of your home to suit my painting.’’

Installation artist Sudarshan Shetty’s studio often resembles a child’s toy cupboard. Except that a strange yet wonderful metamorphosis has occurred. The ‘toys’ now evoke a grisly air. Wooden airplanes that never really take off. Hybrid cello-boats that never leave the shore (but instead produce an eerie sound) or a bathtub with many pairs of mechanically snipping scissors, a macabre twist in the reading of otherwise mundane objects.

‘‘It’s easy to interpret works like the bleeding trombone on a lace table top as belonging to film noir. But I am hoping to make a far deeper, less obvious connection,’’ says the 34-year-old. Employing these everyday instruments to create a third, hidden meaning, his dialogue with ‘manufactured’ objects renders them useless in a world where utility is the key word.

Constantly shifting studios, from Chinchpokli in the eastern mill area of Mumbai to the more central Robert Mani High School at Grant Road, his requirement for large space has not always made his work easy to collect. But Shetty does what he must, without compromise.

It’s not like these artists don’t do commissioned work to sustain themselves, but even then there’s a struggle. While Shetty has attempted quite a few joint ventures with curator-artists, designers and even photographers, he candidly admits it ‘‘hasn’t quite worked out the way I wanted it to’’.

Similarly, Gattani is willing to be critical even about her first semi-installation work that adorns the window of Cellini, the Italian restaurant in the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai. ‘‘I’m not too happy with the fibre optic lights, they twinkle too much, it’s distracting,’’ says Gattani, who plans to ‘‘fix it’’.

‘‘I don’t see anything wrong with patronage,’’ says Basu, ‘‘but there’s no immediate solution to the forces behind art making.’’

Meanwhile, these artists focus on what they have. ‘‘My ability to re-invent with my work so I can address contemporary society with immediacy, is my poison,’’ says Ponmany.

The secret lies, perhaps, in the knowing. ‘‘One must just work and not be conscious of being against the grain,’’ says Basu with a knowledge that comes from being out there a little longer.