Tiger, tiger burning bright

There is no faithful rendering of impressions in K T Shiv Prasad's work. Instead, like a maverick magician, he tosses around incongruous im...

There is no faithful rendering of impressions in K T Shiv Prasad8217;s work. Instead, like a maverick magician, he tosses around incongruous images to come up with pictures which leave the viewer dumbstruck 8212; standing in front of his canvases with a sense of displacement.

It is reality, all right but in colours you haven8217;t seen it in before. Prasad uses a very simple technique to achieve this visual effect. He tosses around photographs like salad, most clicked by him, and then places two disparate ones together. Again, it is no exact rendition imagination and thought are also important ingredients. But his method is not designed just to shock the eye, it is a tool to put across his fascination with different realities which exist side by side but are like isolated microcosms unaware of each other. His wife Marta J Karle, who is an art critic in Bangalore, says, quot;His paintings are fragments of different regional realities put together for instance the image of Buddha juxtaposed with a Western pin-up. And you can feel the tension of this juxtaposition in his paintings.quot; But along with a sense of disturbance these pictures also put forward the possibilities of a future mix where a new culture evolves from isolated regional realities. Another trademark of his paintings is the colour scheme 8212; there is none.

quot;I don8217;t believe in traditional colour schemes, only in colours which exist in real life,quot; says Prasad. But since his reality is different, the colours on his canvases are very striking too. Like in the Tiger Painting 1997, there is a man in a striped yellow tiger suit and spotted rose shorts abruptly frozen half way across the canvas which has a butcher8217;s shop in the background with two pale pink lamb carcasses hanging behind. There is a reflection of a red car on the shop window and below the window two beige fighting rams are painted on a steel blue wall and the floor is dusty pink. Surprisingly the colours don8217;t jar at all and it is also very difficult to walk casually across this painting without stopping.

Averaging around 15 paintings a year, he takes around a week to finish one canvas. But it is the mental preparation which takes a lot of his time. Most of his 17 canvases on display currently measure around six feet by four and a half feet and are priced between Rs 1.25 lakh to Rs 2 lakh. Prasad, who is 50 now, refuses to slot himself with any particular art movement as he finds labels restricting. But one thing he is sure of: his art is entirely his own. Says Prasad, quot;We have been through the whole cycle of Pop Art, Photorealism, Post Modernism but these are extensions of Western movements. Art should depict regional realities not international. After all art is a function of time, space and culture.quot;

And if his talk uses scientific metaphors, it is because he is fascinated with it. quot;It extends your senses thus widening the scope and richness of experience,quot; he says. He has also been a science student. After school, on his father8217;s insistence, he took up engineering but gave it up in two years for J J School of Art, from where he graduated in 1973. And it was his engineering background which helped him keep body and soul together when he was struggling initially in Bangalore. He had picked up the basics of architecture from his room-mates in Bombay and this, coupled with the basics of engineering, made an architect out of him. But soon, he will design his last building 8212; his own home, quot;I want to concentrate on painting now.quot; he says.