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| Wednesday, 2 June 2004 |
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Prem Chowdry explores life by Rohan Jayetilleke Moved by the charm of nature around him the primitive man of India expressed his appreciation of it in works of art in his dwellings of caves and rock-shelters.
Such earliest paintings done with red sand stones are found in India in primitive caves and rock-shelters in Mirzapur and Banda in Uttar Pradesh, in the Mahadev hills of the Vindhya range in Bundelkhand, in the Kaimur hills in the Andhra Pradesh of Bagelkhand, in Singanpur in Raigarh district of Central India and Bellary in South India. The paintings are hunting scenes representing man in his encounters with wild animals. At Bhalduria in Mirzapur district there is a scene of a stag hunt, where harpoons and spears are depicted. Similar scenes at Lohri caves, and Likhuria rock shellers in Son valley too are there. There is a rhinoceros hunt in Ghormangar cave, where a group of six rhinos fight back. Vindhyanava at Sarhat, Kund, Karpatia, Pachmarhi and Hoshangabad in Mahadeva hills and also at xKapgsthi in Bellary district in South India, where besides hinting scenes, a bison fight (ox like animal with high hump and shoulders) are depicted. There are figures of birds, humped bulls too are in the paintings. In the ancient Indian text on painting, Mrichchakatika is mentioned a painter at work surrounded by a large number of colour pans from which he would take a little from each to put it on the canvas. In the 16th century Indian work, Silparatna by Srikumara, in the section on painting gives five principal colours used by a painter white, yellow, red, brown and black and also refers to water colours (rasachitra) and powder or pastel colour (dhulichitra). Thus from very early times the Indian painters both professional and amateur and the housewife who decorated her fore court of the house with 'kolam', walls with rangoli prepared their colour pigments out of sandstones, berries and leaves of different colours and the usage of colour was a tradition handed over to them from one millennia to another millennia. Innovation The sheath of the painter is his pan of colours and his brush his sword though. Prem Chowdhry is exploring life subjects through her consciousness and portray them in oil and acrylic on canvas only working in black white. She needs no white paint or any pigment, white is already there on the canvas and her black contours lines, curves and frills emerge as white. She is a very sensitive soul, as all men of arts are, who are making their works either pictures or written materials, as a means to an end to amass wealth and publicity. Prem Chowdhry is no exception to contemporaries of her age, being, pressured into academics. En route to her university education securing a Masters in History, with history her penchant for art too harmonized. Thus with her Masters degree, she kept her tryst with art clay-modelling at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi and continued to paint as she was accustomed to from her growing up years. In India, most of the painters this writer met recently had a 'Bachelor's degree or a Master's in some discipline not connected to art and also had academic qualification in art too. This enables the painter to be a very sensitive person and also to possess a disciplined mind and averse to any violence or vanity. Common touch In India there is a network of small cities with several villages in the periphery (India has six lakhs of villages and around 80 per cent of the one billion population live in villages engaging in self-supportive and export oriented agriculture and also handicrafts, handloom, fabric industry as a cottage industry, burgeoning). And in these cities there are large shady trees with a circular broad flatform of knee height built, where itinerant tight-rope walkers, magicians, acrobats, singers and dancers entertain the crowds. When in the midst of traffic jams in such cities, biding time for about an hour this writer joined the cheering crowds at these places. Prem Chowdhry gleaned her subjects from this run of the mill for her art from the gamut and the commonplaces. In the Mela series she painted occasionally she portrayed the folk idiom, where she used the Madhubani drawing to adorn walls of houses that served as the decorations as backdrop to the area of action. This is 'rangoli' drawing of housewives to adorn the walls of the houses during Diwali festival in addition to 'kolam' drawings in the immediate forecourt of the main entrances of their houses to indicate to god that the house is now clean and neat and the god to enter their home and give them boons they wish and desire. She later on with the blooming adolescent developed her personal visual perspective, in tandem, lending her hand to human form. India's lush and green foliage and trees were to remain an essential ingredient serving as a boundary for her canvas and the backdrop. This is exemplified in her painting, 'Life in Motion' where a row of trees, line up as a veritable cage, enclosing the area of action. The vertical trees in a row symbolized a large cage, and this was the allegory to elaborate rural life is bound, limited, natural and self-surviving. Her journey from the ordinary toil of common people later cut through such limitations and penetrated into larger social issues, set through centuries of man-made traditions and conventions. This is now popularly known and less spoken or written about 'Gender Issue', or 'Inequality of women as against men, the woman being all the time suffering and the suffered and the man the one in luxury and ease to rule the wife and not the wife hen-peck the husband. Her works drive home the inalienable right and privilege of the woman to carry within her womb for all nine months, under great discomfort and agony, a new life to be born. Man is the fruit of a woman's womb and not the other way about. Even surrogate mothers, fertilizing the sperm of another not the legal husband, too is a woman's role and not that of a man. In her 'Fertility Rites' she posed the question. Prem has never met with any man concerned with this issue, but yet she paints and paints, as a challenge, to all men and women the world over. Technique In her tenth solo exhibition 'Krishna' through one single figure, she has achieved what could not be achieved in a wide canvas of many figures. The single figures have the backdrop nothingness. The expressions of the figure symbolize the inner feelings of man or woman. In her paintings 'Crossing Barriers' she makes the viewer to have an eye-storm to visualize how the woman from a parched and arid as well as falling apart world she moves into greener pastures and salubrious climes. Birds too appear on her canvas as a scavengers, and also as symbols of fragile rights and natural justice and freedom, as bird prey and predate. Trees continue to be the symbolism and impressions of vibrant or dormant life and its growth and decay as trees sometimes wither away or are felled by man or sweeping winds or destroyed by vermins and other causes. Her technique is to undercoat the figures in black, and later scratching away the paint to produce the subject that has woven in her conscience. This is a very time consuming, error intolent process and with her disciplined mind and resilience she continues to bring her works to perfection and explore life's subjects by herself and the viewer too at one stage or others to see with the same conscience she has drawn these spectacular works of art. Her paintings are not just abstract, surrealistic but one that gives the viewer many hours of patient meditation to grasp to his own mind, as to how Prem Chowdhry's mind mill turns and turns unceasingly. **** Back **** |
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