The Hindu Business Line : Down to art

There were mixed expectations when Roshmi Raychaudhuri and Baidehi Chatterjee of Contemporary Art-India invited me to ‘Earth on Canvas’ — an exhibition they curated and organised on invitation from WWF-India.

Mixed expectations, because creative people can feel a little cramped by a theme. As a Delhi art curator once confided, some artists can be untouched by specifications, choosing to share just any work. Others can be unmoved. Or they can be so steeped in the Muse, the crux of the theme can be lost. As historian-author David McCullough once confessed: “People ask me when I start one of these projects, what is your theme? I haven’t the faintest idea.”

However, it is to the credit of the curators, to WWF-India on whose premises the showing was held, and to the passion the participants feel for the cause that this proved to be one of the most powerful collections in recent times in terms of numbers, signatures, quality, diversity and intensity. Not often do you find Arpana Caur, GA Dandekar, Jai Zharotia, Paritosh Sen, Prokash Karmakar, Shipra Bhattacharya, Shuvaprasanna and Sunil Das together. There were works from overseas, like the mixed media on canvas by Mahirwan Mamtani from Germany. As Swapan Mullick, Director, Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute noted, “Seldom does one find a large group subscribing to a common idea… it is thus a striking departure from normal practice to find more than eight artists joining hands…” There were 84, in fact.

Inaugurated by Gursharan Kaur, wife of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the exposition was built up with considerable thought with canvases beginning virtually at the entrance to the WWF office, and all the way up the stairs to the gallery. Not everyone created for the show. Several of the works date from earlier years. They participated because they shared the concern for the rampant environmental degradation all around. These works were born of that distress.

A true example of that angst is Sunil Das’ Our World Today (oil and acrylic on canvas). It dates to 1989, when ecological issues “had less momentum.” Seen as a painting, it is powerful with symbolism, with the play of a blackened earth against a corner of green, with plastic strips adding to the texture. The wooden frame has been hammered in with rusting nails. The symbolism could not have been more stark. It also continues to be relevant, perhaps even more so today than when it was created.

The exhibition was divided into a wide spectrum of issues, such as spirit of conservation, climatic change, pollution of rivers, forests and tribes, environment and culture, and conservation of heritage and architecture. The treatment was diverse. For some, it was time to get idyllic, like Dhiraj Choudhury’s Shakuntala. For others, it was a time for introspection, like Sh Sahajahan’s Time and Life.

And right there, holding its own next to the large and powerful work of Sunil Das was Paritosh Sen’s childlike Black Butterfly against Gold Background. Shuvaprasanna’s canny owl reminds you of the danger to the bird from feeding on rats and field mice poisoned by pesticide.

There are those that remind you of the grim situation we have created for ourselves. Pradip Bhowmick, in a Kalighat-like work about a tiger shoot, reminds you, “It is estimated that India loses at least one tiger every day.”

A series of photographs by Chhatrapati Dutta are powerful compositions, which are simple but hard-hitting in their message about the marginalised. Veteran lensman Mahendra Kumar captures several issues in Erosion of Deity, where images lie abandoned against a brick wall, forgotten by their devotees.

As for the sculpture pieces the messages are sometimes direct as in Debabrata De’s Passive Smoking showing three men with the one in the centre smoking. Or Shyam Kanu Borthakur’s gripping More Power to Animals! In other pieces, there is a harkening to a lost world like Dhiraj Choudhur’s Krishna II, interesting because of its colour, theme, composition and texture.

The works, whatever the medium, size and approach, as the curators point out, are like an artistic umbilicus “with the beauty of our planet… re-examining the values and assumptions that have dislocated us from our roots and pushed us into lonely, psychological spaces…”

The art fraternity has picked up brush and chisel for a greener world. Now what about the rest of us?

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