Photographic Memory

Prasad Abu Bakr

Information: Even though we want to think for ourselves most of the time, in today's context we are exposed to so much of information, with so many things happening around us.

That we unintentionally tend to be influenced by certain things we saw in the past, be it a painting, a piece of literary work that we read or a musical composition we listened to. Which might have created an impact on us and was embedded in our subconscious minds.

Today this fact is becoming more and more evident, as we walk through galleries we see repetitions of old masters taking a new face. Walking through modern structures we see hints from past works of legendry architects taken new form.

Young film makers getting influenced by the works of new masters and in the literary field it is more than often that we feel that we are reading something that we have already read before.

This is in no way a mass phenomenon but it is happening. Medical experts say that sometimes style and presentation can be genetical. This can be condoned scientifically.

Does this mean it is possible that one of Picasso's siblings generations after him can produce similar works. But the possibility remains that other than a professional copyist, someone next to kin too may be able to do a perfect repetition of his forefathers work.

What we are talking here mostly is of being influenced by others work and may unconsciously include some of it's features in something we may produce upon immediately seeing it or years later, which may thin the effect of wanting the features to be connected more perfectly to the original work.

To some people dabbling in the commerce of art another persons photographic memory may come in handy and very useful. A lot of fake works copied from original master of the past are already doing the rounds in Europe making even the interpol wake up to it looking for the culprits.

In this part of Asia too it is happening in a large scale but the subject of art occupies a low profile in most of Asian societies, that detecting hazards such as copying takes a lower rung position.

The beginning of this entire process starts at a very young age, unless otherwise children who tend to copy come under the wing of a well trained art teacher or live with knowledgable parents, who are well informed about the art and the literary world around them.

"My younger fellow paints like Hussain" my friend from New Delhi told me during my stay there sometime back. True to the word it was when I witnessed the ten year chaps work, they were copies of the great artist's style but with subjects pertaining more to his age.

So it was refreshing in a way. A selection of new subjects taking the face of the great master. The kid himself was highly effected by the fact that he was compared to the great artist. But today the lad is a seventeen year old and has moved out completely from that phase.

During one of my more recent visits he told me that copying Hussain has made him move away from copying anyone as he grew up.

He explained that as he grew up the very idea that people were comparing his work to one of India's great artists worried him so much that it took him a lot of perseverance to break away and build his own identity.

Looking at his newer set of paintings I did not think much of them then, but his mother in an e-mail to me more recently tells me that the boy did well at his first solo exhibition and sold more than half the collection.

Which is a good sign for a young artist in a place like Delhi, or India for that matter, where competition is stiff for any artist.