|
Entertainment
Art inspired by Beethoven
Images stimulated by melody... a work by Kishore Chatterjee.
NOT HAVING been trained to draw, paint and sculpt as a professional, Kishore Chatterjee is under no compulsion to churn out art without inspiration. A life long connoisseur of the western high music, Kishore, the visual artist, is often inspired by the music he listens. Looking at his works one gets the feeling that his response to the natural world too is often mediated by music. Like many other professionally untrained celebrated artists' inspired art, Kishore's too are primarily uninhibited expressions of emotion and imagination, rather than of cerebration, contemplation and design.
It is not that uncommon for the artists of one medium to be inspired by art in another medium. However, inspiration is one thing and building up of linguistic equivalents across the physical specificities of another art is a distinctly different proposition. Baudelaire in his poem, `Correspondence,' held the latter to be a creative concern of high order. If not consciously or always, at least in some works of the Beethoven suit of drawings, paintings, collages, lino-cut prints and sculptures Kishore Chatterjee (recently exhibited at the far-south Calcutta's Galerie la Mere) has instinctively transformed his auditory stimulus into visual response, deeply, that is linguistically, and not just illustratively. However, in most other, the music connoisseur and Beethoven aficionado Kishore reveals his emotional encounters with Beethoven, the person and his music. So, what we see in Kishore's `Beethoven: Faces and Facets' suit of works, is more Kishore than Beethoven. Nevertheless, as these are the responses of a music connoisseur and Beethoven specialist they deserve to be regarded as one authoritative interpretation.
The faces part of the Faces and Facets, however, do not involve any interpretations. The portraits of Ludwig von Beethoven have very little to do with representation of the likeness of the great composer, as he was in a particular age range. Even though the likenesses are not missing, these are the images of the genius Kishore has emotively grasped and then projected. The better ones are those which instantly communicate to the viewers the spirit of Beethoven's compositions. Others convey to the beholders Kishore's impression of the person that Beethoven was, primitive, possessed and intense. Some of these are papier mache sculptures with different types of added materials. The rest are mixed media paintings and drawings.
Some of Kishore's collages with printed and/ or drawn likenesses of Beethoven, as well as some monochromatic lino-cut prints with figures having resemblance to those in the Faces pieces, can be placed in both the groups.
Other sculptures, like the Christ-head with a crown of thorns, collages, mixed-media semi-abstract paintings and lino-cuts belong to the Facet group and have been created in response to the experience of Beethoven's musical creations. The musical compositions which inspired Kishore to create visuals include the Eroica (collage), the Prometheus ballet (lino-cut), the Fidelio opera (sculpture), the 9th Symphony (collage), the Pastoral symphony (landscape painting) and Missa Solemnis (sculpture), etc. The highly verbose gestural quality of these visual compositions seem to be expressive of the music alluded to.
PRANABRANJAN RAY
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Entertainment
|
