Along the pathway on the eastern side of Cholamandalam Art Gallery, there is a steel blue sculpture by Maggy Owen of The Netherlands, unostentatiously titled Tree . Nestling amongst trees, it resembles a verdant canopy with many loops open to the sky. The artist draws from that unquantifiable emotion, turning that notion of a tree into something definite that we can experience. Even if Owen’s intention is barely disguised, it requires the artist to go beyond any predictable imagery to let the viewer imagine.
Chennai artist N. Ramachandran recalls, “Till the age of nine, I remember feeling stifled. I was disinterested in most things and a slow learner. Then suddenly one day, I saw a friend drawing and I was filled with a new passion. I began to draw with fervour and filled up books with my sketches. Finally, I related to the world and this stabilized me.” All constrictions removed, Ramachandran began to do well at his studies. Imagination achieves what rote and routine cannot. The field expands and new possibilities emerge, allowing us to go far beyond the rigid confines of life.
In India, we have our flying chariots and the superhuman Hanuman, we have our mythologies where Gods take on many avatars and come to earth. Many of these scenes are depicted in temple art. As times change, contexts change. Society thirsts for new myths. Art, like mythology, is a channel to express the intangible. Imagination becomes the vehicle and the artist is the driver. For Asma Menon, making mythologies has been inseparable from painting. Asma roots her painting in accessible forms by using techniques much favoured in Indian crafts. The fairy-tale like characters of her paintings are housed within the space of a quilt or tapestry, many times with definite borders making us comfortable to visit her works as made-up, not reality. In Elephant Walk , an elephant is wildly patterned between a patchwork and a jigsaw puzzle. He clomps across a pond with pink lotuses. In the background, the patterning and layering continues: trees with wave-like sections hold leaves, flowers and stitched textures. Emerald green grass unfolds in padded strokes. In Earth’s Bounty , jellyfish and dolphins swim in a tree. Squirrels sit next to seahorses. The entire trunk of the tree is scalloped as if seashells are growing organically on the tree bark. The incessant, vibrant, uncontained explorations of colours and forms in these paintings are somehow bound together. By what, is hard to define, as Asma’s exploration is truly uninhibited taking us back to that time where as children, we were allowed to paint with our fingers.
Asma’s canvases are not small, showing her proficiency in the complex arrangements she makes with colour and form in her hallucinogenic landscapes where multiple narratives coalesce. In Once Upon a Time , she executes a black and white rendering, in her flamboyant style, of a waterfront with many boats and couples, perhaps lovers. The bottom border has paper boats and pink lotuses. The sides have coconut trees with red and black beetles crawling up blue space. In the middle on top, like a crown, a red heart is placed, sort of squished as if an imperfect love reigns. Venice or India, I hypothesize. When I talk to Asma she says, “ Once Upon a time is about the way Madras used to be, with those old buildings, boat rides…”
As a child she was shy; she would often sit on a broad window ledge, concealed behind curtains and draw. “I had two passions. I loved scribbling and I loved my dolls. I would make them beds out of shoeboxes!” The box and the window frames still figure: her painted stories are contained and boxed similarly. I ask her about the borders in her paintings. “We would get together and plan weddings and everyone was involved in making the trousseau a year before the wedding.” In the Khoja community, saris with large embroidered borders were popular. All these memories of a charmed childhood, the joy of coming together, cross-stitch patterns and satin flowers, blankets and sewing kits return now to her montages in painting. It is only possible with imagination, a gift given to every human that we can harness infinitely.
(Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city)
