It is no accident, perhaps, that at a moment when Western society seems to be bound in ever-tightening circles of enslavement to the priorities of a denaturised, electronically-obsessed and intensely materialistic culture, people are increasingly turning towards an art that proclaims its rejection of such and the fundamentally mechanistic and disillusioned creative work that emerges out of such debased values, one that proposes, instead, a re-exploration of those core expressive values of poetry and imagination, colour and nature, painting and drawing.
The wonder is that, given the huge concerns that are now so forcefully beginning to emerge about climate change and the destruction of the environment, how comparatively disjointed and still comparatively few in number (and how disparaged in official artistic circles also) these Western artists are – in this country Alan Davie, Len McComb, Evelyn Williams, the young Leeds-based painter Christopher P. Wood are among the few such names that come readily to mind. All of which may help to explain, in part at least, the quite remarkable flowering of interest that has been taking place in the country in contemporary Indian art, not simply among Indian collectors here, but among English writers and collectors also, with the recent opening of several major galleries in London, Art Pilgrim London among them, showcasing the now extraordinary range and depth of recent Indian art.
Considered among the finest painters of the middle generation of Indian artists, with a string of major shows behind him in both public and private spaces on the sub-continent, Sidharth’s second London exhibition, of over thirty works from his recent, much praised Baramaha series (2003-6) at the gallery, is thus an event of very particular significance for our understanding of this phenomenon. With their revelation of a quite profound understanding for the symbolic and sensuous elements of colour, innate sympathy for the natural world and quiet mastery of materials, these paintings, of the Indian months of Phalgun, Poukh, Manghar and Waisakh, (some 12 in all) make it clear that Sidharth is an artist who will surely establish himself with British audiences as well as Indian.
Sidharth’s is a remarkable story, the patterns, and passion which were established early in childhood when, as one of six children of an impoverished Punjabi agricultural family, he sat and watched his mother grinding and mixing the rock and earth colours that she would use to paint the papier-mache bowls and toys which she would sell to make extra income for her family. “Since my childhood I have been searching for my colours, my colours, the colours of Nature, the colours that talk to me” he now observes and, in the extreme happiness of a childhood where his mother would ask him every evening not ‘What did you do today?’ but ‘What did you see today?’ we can see, unmistakeably, the roots of the cute visual habits and energies that have infused his work ever since.
Brought up in the Sikh tradition, one of which he is enormously proud even to this day (though no longer practising), his earliest work, (aged 12-13), other than decorating the walls of grand houses for a master mason, was making devotional pictures for the sikh temple. By the age of 15, realising he needed proper tuition, he left home to apprentice himself, for some five years, in the techniques of Thangka painting practised by the Tibetan Lamas at Dharamashala, their use of only natural colours reinforcing, for a period at least, the lessons he had learnt from his mother while their understanding of the act of painting as an act of painting ever since. A brief and unhappy winter in Sweden with a fellow Swedish student followed, (though even from this Sidharth learnt some significant artistic lessons, the Rembrandt and St Birgitta’s Church there marking the beginnings of an understanding for western art that has continued to grow over the years) before he returned to India and resumed his studies at Chandigarh College of Art for some five years.
Over the next decade or so, working for the most part in oil on canvas, Sidharth began his travels in the rural Punjab, discovering the folk motifs that were to form the basis of his subject matter right up to the mid 1990s – notably the critically well-received Satappu (Hopscotch) and Mela (Fair) series – before a growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of such themes and techniques led to a dramatic reappraisal of his aims and intentions and, in 1997, the quite astonishingly rich and beautiful series of works on paper entitled Neti Neti of 1997 – 2003 (literally ‘Not this, Not that’ , a term used in Hindu scriptures when explaining God, the Infinite). They mark a fundamental break with the work that had immediately preceded it, though in its profound reappraisal of his methods and materials it can also be seen as representing an intensely emotional rediscovery of the lessons he had first learnt at his mother’s feet. A conversation with a leading expert/painter in the traditional gouache techniques of Rajastan led him to start exploring the use of pure inorganic pigments bound gum Arabic (from the neem tree) and mixed with water and the use of their traditional wasli paper, then still being handmade in a village near Jaipur.
The saturated density, range and brilliance of colours he now achieved
in these large landscape watercolours, painstakingly ground from rocks
and minerals by hand or derived from plant or tree-bark sources (five
different yellow from mangoes for example!) seems to have caught even
Sidharth by surprise, leading him, in 2003, to embark on the even more
symbolically ambitious sequence of the Baramaha paintings, twelve works
which take up a theme which has, over many hundreds of years, provided
the starting point not only for Persian and Rajasthani painters but poets,
musicians, dancers and philosophers among others. That he brings it to
such a moving and exhilarating conclusion not only says much about his
poetic understanding of his human and cultural experience - ancient scriptures,
meteorological patterns, astronomy, human nature - but also of how, employing
freedom that come very much from modern times, these same understanding
can be subsumed and expressed in colours and materials made from that
same natural world from which they were first derived. You can imagine
Sidharth nodding agreement with that arch – modernist of post-war Western
art, Robert Rauschenberg, when he observed “I think a picture is more
like the real world when it’s made of real world”.
- Nicholas Usherwood
Features Editor - Galleries magazine.
April 2007
