Stepping into the studio

FEW interior spaces tell us so much about their occupants as an artist's studio does. For there, in the midst of the sketches, brushes and pigments, the maquettes and the wires, the stretched canvases and the turpentine jars, we have an autobiography laid out in the form of objects, the exposed machinery of a life. I have a weakness for psychological portraiture, and this is probably why the artist's studio is one of my favourite interiors.

The artist is at his most vulnerable in the studio. What we see on display in the gallery, in the form of an exhibition, are the successful choices he has made as a painter, sculptor, print- maker or installator; sometimes, success merely means the careful masking of error. But the studio tells no lies, suppresses no evidence: it shows us, not just the graceful masterworks that have borne fruit, but also the false moves, the wrong turnings, the clumsy experiments that were abandoned along the way. In this sense, the studio restores our faith in the humanity of the artist: here is no demigod who makes no mistakes, but someone who runs an obstacle course like the rest of us. The difference is that while the rest of us are pretty pedestrian at the hurdles, the artist knows how to do a Nureyev on them.

And the advantage of having so many friends who are artists is that I get to see the studio in all its many avatars. It could be meticulously ordered in rows of brushes and palettes, like Jehangir Sabavala's or Laxman Shreshtha's; or it could be a flourishing and genially orchestrated disorder of paintings, river-stones and bell-metal figures, as Mehlli Gobhai's is. It might be cluttered with dissected lampshades, pulleys, wax pillows and bewitching mannequins waking to life, like Sudarshan Shetty's; or then it might be clinical and almost mathematically patterned to contain the chaos, as Gieve Patel's and Atul Dodiya's work-spaces are.

The fact that every studio offers a fresh surprise to the senses, a fresh mystery to the spirit, struck me again last month, as I walked up the narrow stairs to Gulammohammed Sheikh's studio in Baroda. Sheikh is one of India's most distinguished painters and explorers of cultural realities; and when we stand before his luminous panels - in which figures and landscapes weave in and out of each other - we know why. He has been preoccupied, for some time now, with the figure of the mystic possessed by revelation, the holy fool, God's madman.

In their quest, Sheikh's paintings do not respect the territorial boundaries that stitch us into our provincial attitudes: his frames are populated by a dizzying assembly of figures, ranging from Kalidasa's cloud-messengers through Fra Angelico's angels to Kabir, the saintly weaver whose shawl rolls out to the world's edge. If we stand on the ghats of Banaras at one instant, we are transported within the crenellated walls of a mediaeval Italian city the next. We have barely rested in the shade of a rock outcrop, when the rhythms of the painting carry us onward across the desert.

The high point of Sheikh's current body of work, on which he has been engaged for a few years now, is a marvellous "book of journeys", a book that opens out like an accordion of painted pages which can be folded into varying combinations, or arranged on the floor like the wall of an imposing, yet welcoming fortress. As we play with the possibilities of arrangement, a luminous blue and turmeric rainbow, reminiscent of the sky in a Rajput painting, can arch across a Siennese landscape, and a pensive archangel can make his annunciation in a grove beside the Ganga.

The book of journeys is also a book of secrets that we uncover for ourselves, lessons about our multiple identities that we learn from whispered asides, songs and parables, rather than from hectoring orations on multiculturalism.

As I left these visions behind, the thought came to me that the studio affirms, not only the artist's humanity, but also our own. By giving us breath-taking epiphanies to savour and riddles to unravel, by pushing us into an awareness of ideas and sensations that we cannot yet name, it forces us to rise to the challenge of grasping what we do not fully understand. As the painter Badri Narayan once said to me, art is one of the "elegances of the spirit". All that this inner refinement asks for is an openness of mind, a responsiveness to the image, an ability to release oneself creatively to an encounter with the art-work; by contrast, we only rejoice in our self-imposed limitations when we claim that art is too much trouble to understand.

RANJIT HOSKOTE

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Section  : Features
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