Fifteen years ago, visiting S.G. Vasudev at his Koramangala studio in Bengaluru, I asked him what it felt like to be a senior artist. “When Panicker was 60, all of us used to look up to him. Now that I am 60, I feel only that I still have such a long way to go.”
Vasu is now 76, and I’m reminded of these words as I meet him at the lovely open-air café at NGMA Bengaluru, where a retrospective of his work opened yesterday. Curated by Sadanand Menon, the show contains nearly 400 of Vasudev’s works, blurring the boundaries between art and craft, in different media and across six decades.
Born in Mysore in 1941, where his mother was an amateur artist, Vasudev had been encouraged to follow his vocation after his early newspaper caricatures were noticed. He left Karnataka in 1960 on a scholarship to study art at Government College of Arts, Madras.
There, his career was guided by the then principal K.C.S. Panicker. He also met Girish Karnad, who had just returned to India; both Kannada speakers, Vasudev and Karnad interacted and worked together. At a time of fierce questioning across the arts, the friendship with Karnad compelled Vasudev to read modern Kannada literature widely, forging creative collaborations in illustration, theatre and film that would become a hallmark of his work.
Between art and craft
From 1966 to 1988, Vasudev lived and worked as a founding member in Cholamandal Artists’ Village outside Chennai, along with his artist wife Arnawaz Driver. Cholamandal was a disruptive moment in post-Independence art. Panicker had gathered a group of young artists to stake out a small campus outside Madras to set up the commune.
The artists pooled money to buy the land, and sold batiks, terracotta, ceramics and copper reliefs to make money. They worked on craft for fixed hours each day, thus funding their search for a new idiom for Indian modernism in the South. “Living there, I realised there is a thin line between art and craft: for example, was Mahabalipuram built by craftsmen or artists?” reflects Vasudev.
Art itself was not an easy road to follow those days; leaving the city for this remote destination was even harder. “They were literally going into the woods, a pattikadu in those days. It was an extraordinary project,” says Menon. Named after the Cholas, the artists’ village came up near the sea, in a casuarina grove, with no electricity or metalled roads. For the artists, it was a time of optimism and adventure. They were looking for new ways to engage with and respond to tradition without simply repeating the venerated past. For them, history and tradition were needed; they must be looked at and come to terms with, but in the language of the present.
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In 1988, after the death of Arnawaz, Vasu returned to Bangalore with his son. “Arnawaz had not only been my partner but also my in-house critic. It took time for me to readjust,” he reflects. After having lived in an artists’ commune for over two decades, it was also a return to a greatly changed cityscape. From a Walden Pond-like refuge, he was returning to a city that was in a churn of its own.
If Madras was the home of India’s oldest art school, Bangalore’s advantage was that it had no single strong art institution. “All sorts of art goes on here: installation, site-specific, performance, video art. There is space for everything.” The move pitched Vasudev into a diverse creative community, including playwrights, journalists, filmmakers, poets, actors, and citizens deeply engaged in the life of their city. It offered him the possibility of strengthening connections across the arts and developing, in his own work, a multilayered response to history, contemporary life, and the environment. Theatre director B.V. Karanth had also returned to Karnataka at the time, to set up the theatre repertory Rangayana, which he would head until 1995. Girish Karnad had moved from Madras to Bangalore.
Amidst society
It was here that Vasudev met journalist and writer Ammu Joseph. Their marriage introduced Vasudev to another dimension of civic engagement. His studio was in the heart of the city, amidst traffic signals and noise. His art became more socially engaged, more rooted in the here and the now. The Vriksha, hitherto a mythical element in his canvases, began to appear wounded and denuded, its branches broken, in a city where urban commons were disappearing to make way for unplanned construction. The eyes of human faces in his work, hitherto empty and blank, began to be filled with irises and pupils, bearing witness to the environment. “You have to be in the midst of society. That is what tells you you’re not dead.”
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Connections across the arts have led to some of Vasudev’s best work. The Tree of Life appeared in his work after he encountered Bendre’s ‘Kalpa Vriksha Vrindavana’. Vasudev has designed the covers of landmark works in Kannada literature; he has made drawings based on A.K. Ramanujan’s poetry, designed masks for Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana , theatrical sets for B.V. Karanth’s theatre, and art-directed films like Vamsha Vriksha and Samskara , the adaptation of U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel directed by Pattabhirama Reddy.
Vasudev’s collaboration on tapestries with master weaver Subbarayalu from the Weavers’ Service Centre, whom he met through M.F. Husain, is now over 20 years old. “I don’t paint for the tapestry; the weaver works on the tapestry based on my painting. And he takes his time over it.”
Changing city
Vasudev tells me about another of his mentors: the great K.K. Hebbar. It was Hebbar who encouraged Vasudev to show his work outside; from Hebbar he learnt that one must mentor and guide the young. When he went to visit him at the end of his life, when Hebbar was in pain, Vasudev took paper and paints to encourage the aging painter to work. But the next time he went to meet him, Hebbar asked Vasudev if he really wanted him to repeat himself at this stage of his life.
Vasudev’s relationship with the city has expressed itself in public art: murals at Majestic theatre Rangashankara, for instance. It has also led to important new outreach initiatives, such as Ananya Drishya, that focuses on arts education for students.
Another beautiful project is the Art Park: noticing that people weren’t going to art galleries, Vasu decided an effort must be made to bring art to the people. The Art Park is a monthly event in the beautiful gardens next to Ravindra Kalakshetra, where people can speak to artists, watch them work and buy art at affordable prices. “We’ve had invitations to hold the event in other parts of the city as well,” says Vasu.
It may seem that to advocate for the arts — in the context of urgent basic needs like healthcare, nutrition, education and livelihoods — may be pretentious, an effete indulgence. But Vasudev’s work shows that art continues to be a powerful form of expression, a way to comment on contemporary issues, and engage with the life of a changing city.
ON SHOW: Inner Resonance: A Return to Sama, NGMA Bengaluru, till September 30.
The writer is an IAS officer based in Bengaluru.
Published - September 01, 2018 04:43 pm IST
