Black-and-white paintings of dancers adorn the walls of artist AV Ilango’s compact studio inside the Lady Andal school campus. A group of children sits with heads bent — pouring their creativity onto white chart, guided by two other staff. Ilango is busy coordinating with a gallery owner in Mumbai over phone for his next exhibition. Meanwhile, he is also prepping for a show at CP Art Centre. On his table is his authored book — Coming Home to Earth: Space, Line, Form , released in 2015. Sipping a glass of hot tea, the artist, as if revealing a secret, says, “I see you as just a bunch of lines.”
As the conversation progresses, we understand that that’s how he sees everything, everybody. Even the cup of tea that’s in his hand. “The personality, and what you are, what you do, doesn’t matter. What’s important are the lines that make you up. Those are the expressions of energy.”
Moves and moods
In the 1980s, when Ilango was just a boy, he would ride a motorbike every day to Bharatanatyam dancer Priyadarshini Govind’s studio to watch her dance. “They would give me a cup of coffee and let me be. I would sit and observe the movements carefully, sketch them in my mind, and in my book.” What he observed was that the ‘lines’ of energy moved from within to without in Bharathanatyam. “Most of the movements start from close to the body, and extend outwards.”
Later, he was fascinated by the Odissi dance form, and sketched in the dark hall of The Music Academy, whenever dancers such as Laxmipriya Mohapatra performed. As luck would have it, he met Ramli Ibrahim, a renowned Odissi dancer from Malaysia, and stayed over at Sutra Dance Theatre for days, to capture the lines, which “were far more sensuous, and travelled all over the body”. In the last one-and-a-half years, his new interest has been Mohiniattam, “which emulates the movement of coconut trees swaying in the wind”. “Here, the lines travel from outside to inside.” What triggered his interest in the dance form was a performance by Deepa Chakravarthy. Laya and Lasya, an exhibition of Ilango’s artworks on Mohiniattam which opened to the public recently, had Chakravarthy herself giving a demo to the audience.
A transcendental experience
Ilango was a Math professor till 2004, before he took up art full time. Born in Gobichettipalayam, in his school days, he remembers participating in a painting competition and ruining the chart paper, as he had no idea what to do with a bowl of water and a brush.
After he failed Math in Class IX, his focus turned to improving his grades, and he did. Art took a backseat. Ask him what triggered the shift, and he casually says, “It has always been there. I probably acquired all the vasana from my previous life. When you are born, you are born with a mind, that has vasana s that you can never get rid of.” And art is a transcendental experience, which brings out these vasana s to the world. “Just like an incense stick…”
The philosophy of Indian art has always been like this, he says: “When you paint a jar you become the jar”. The process includes seeing, perceiving, internalising, becoming and being.
“When you conceive an idea, you internalise it and become pregnant with the idea. Just like how a child grows inside the womb, an idea grows in the womb of the mind. When an idea gets delivered — your mindchild — there is definitely labour pain.” We see him thoughtfully applying a few final strokes on a large-size canvas — a work that'll be displayed as part of the show.
“These lines, ” he continues, “can be visible, invisible, emotional or hidden. For instance, what is that one powerful and dynamic line that appears and disappears?” There is a brief pause, after which he says in an almost conclusive note, “A smile.”
