Prints on the sands of time

SATISH GUPTA used to paint landscapes and seascapes. When he travelled to the Rungtak monastery in Sikkim, the beauty of Nature there overwhelmed him. He painted a watercolour of the brightly lit valley and before entering the monastery, he threw the painting as an offering to Nature into the valley. The monastery on the other hand was dark, with bronze/brass images of Buddha all around, which came to 'life' when the arathi was carried around.

The experience had a great impact on him and confirmed his philosophy that life is not linear. He decided that he must look at things from different perspectives and later ended up in the Thar desert in western Rajasthan. He has done numerous paintings on the various aspects of the desert - portraits of the royalty, the havelis with their richly carved pillars, doors and windows and the murals, the men and women in their colourful costumes, the nomads roaming the desert, the desert fairs and the vast sandy expanse.

Travelling in the Thar, living with the nomads, experiencing the facets of desert life and painting the Thar, Satish has developed a close relationship with some of the members of the villages, such as the camel man Kasim, who was his first contact.

"The Eyes of the Thar," a book containing some excellent works by Satish Gupta, was launched in Chennai by the IWA recently, coinciding with an exhibition of his drawings at the Apparao Galleries. The plates in the book or the large pencil drawings, which are actually the preliminaries to his later prints, reveal dedication to his art as well as the people and their life he chooses to portray. The eyes are the most important features - they seem to simply bore into the viewer and even challenge him/her to a conversation.

Why are the eyes always light? Gupta confesses, "Some of them do have light eyes; but I also prefer to paint them light because that way I can bring the effect of light on them which would reveal the expressions better". He does not omit the details of the carvings or the colourful embroidery or the festival decorations. When he wants to register a scene, say the caravan of the nomads, he uses pastels and colour pencils.

Gupta felt that painting brought out too much of the ego of the artist; therefore he chose to take up print-making, which has challenges to offer to the artist. His works are generally very large, sometimes larger than life-size and so he uses large plates for etching his drawings; these are printed on to canvas, instead of paper, in the viscosity method so that multiple colours can be printed at one go. Only one print is made from an etching, unlike in general where multiple editions are made.

"The Eyes of the Thar" takes one on a journey through the desert accompanied by its people; the sensuousness of the very glance and the pose of the young women, the innocent, enquiring look of the children, the commanding, challenging look of the men, draw the viewer into their lives and the mystery and austere beauty of the sand dunes. On the occasion of the launch of the book at the Park Sheraton, Anita Ratnam read, rather enacted, some poems written by Satish Gupta, which also brought out the symbol of the circle of life.

LAKSHMI VENKATRAMAN

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