UMESH VARMA
by Keshav Malik

#2119, Trying to Understand My World, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2008

An artist belongs to his or her generation, and grows up at different rates, and in different environments. If this be so, Umesh Varma has operated under the same dispensation. The climate of life, which also implies mental life, especially in land-locked north Indian cities, cannot but mould your personality. At the same time the overall pattern of your daily routine is sure to mark you and your perceptions of life. In this case, as the painter is steeped in Khariboli chands and dohas it should be interesting to see how that rich heritage has effected his art. Another thing is that when there is an excess of social change psychic uncertainties are likely to prevail in our mental setups. If one is a reflective being, one ponders much on what or who you are as also on the state of your ethos. So that it is just possible that till hitherto the actual content as well as the symbols in Umesh's paintings were drawn from the local culture. In those foregoing works he projected by the magic of empathy, the modes and moods and manners of the folk. If these works had an instinctive tic, and quite recognizably so, the present works do not do so at all since art, or the vision that is expected of successful artworks, vaults over its creaturely, or fated, conditions. The slices of life represented in art works are detached from the flux of events and transmuted to well wrought fresh forms. The context of immediate life in Umesh's new painting gives way to a far wider, or purer, space of spiritual sensations. Here art is action rather than an imitation of life, but not a problem solver. It is an entity that teases and chastises us, and brings up the level of our awareness, but this is only possible on the premise of an artist's skill. It is in this that the artist has taken us aback. The work and the craft are a new mutation. The artist, one notices, mulls over his subject over and over again. The need to find means by which he can express the innermost thought processes behind has calligraphic cum vibrating forms. This itself is an immense and commendable effort.

#2169, Sun, Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches, 2002

As the artist's perceptions have grown still deeper and more complex, his paintings are equally more meaningful and at the same time difficult to execute. Since now he doggedly pursues these obsessions or his artistic sense of objective reality his work grows multi layered with meanings. The art is a severe and hard taskmaster behind which has been the slow maturation of a keen artistic conscience.

For those who know the body of Umesh's work, it becomes increasingly clear that he has gained increasing confidence in his craft, and that he has become bolder and more innovative within the last few years. He has not rested content with trying out well known international styles, rather he threw off the weight of unimaginative neo-academicism and has tried to express life experiences by his own individual light.

#2122, Sea of Time, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, 2005

In a lengthy enough artistic passage, some of Umesh's works have been classical; others expressionistic or lyrically abstract. If some have created animal or organic forms, others play with surface, mass, posture or structure. Some of them are startling and symbolic, being imaginative creation of potent ideas. Certain of them have offered a disordered 20th century vision, and still others as though designed for an ironical anatomy lesson. At places hairless and gaunt homo sapiens we are a sort of unvarnished primary truth of the times. These of the works had a decided primitive energy as seeks to provoke us to thought. Umesh has employed several media for his creations. Surrealistically rendered, some of the heads as if screwed on with significant semiotic associations. These works too were most imaginatively presented. His shiny busts and figures were in the anatomical class with a flavour all their own.

So as you mentally survey these works with pleasure, none seldom identical in size or shape, yet all are of the same comely stock. At the heart of some there linger memories of flora. Elsewhere appear the attempts to recapture something of a past loveliness in these mindless times. Genuine is the artist's true love, but that genuine is rare. So out of negatives the artist pulls off completely and is thankful for this first sign of an acknowledgement of the harmoniously dovetailed whole.

#2168, Nandi - the Singer and the Bull, Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches, 2001

The work does not, as the day's art works go, answer to a dreary machine model. So, for the artist he has at his disposal new image compounding methods and perhaps new geometric materials capable of supplying far greater elasticity of artistic design than we have ever known him employing. Men have shown how they can be adapted to produce an art that is organic in its vital relationship with the character of the world stuff. The ideas are there. But they will be used only by the imaginative, deeply questioning artist. So come Umesh's artistic, gloriously unique compositions.

To live in India's exhausting metros is to practice to a considerable degree Plato's visionary precept for a full education, when he insisted that we should seek out those artist craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatever is lovely and gracious, so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, drink in good from every quarter whence, like a breeze bearing health from happy regions; some influence from noble works constantly falls upon eye and ear from childhood upward, and imperceptibly draws them into sympathy and harmony with the beauty of reason, whose impress they take.

#2114, Kosi Maiya, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, 2008

Umesh Varma has had that very samskar intact in his being and so the dignity as the music of his work. He has for long been made aware of the taint of uncontrolled industrialism. He does not complain of industry. But artistic spirit is vulnerable. It needs a wholesome mental climate of all the artistic music. A balanced sense of humanity's needs has not been lost on him. His new work requires the tribute of health and beauty, and not money. The life of the mind and heart are now so deformed but then his outlook has never been pathetically invaded by the day's mechanistic digital art. Works of art can be beautiful things, even in this heartless period. So Umesh has been making a titanic effort of goodwill to make the bright vision of younger artists into a visible reality. Meanwhile, the greater part of our otherwise younger artists live in surroundings that by no stretch of the imagination could even approximate to that 'wholesome climate' that Plato required for the nourishment of human wholeness. Umesh's now fully mature work is a proof that nobility of image is still possible in honest work. Almost untouched by the day's rat race Umesh's new work retains its integrity. But this integrity is first and foremost the result of his own sensitivity to the climate of culture and barbarism around. He instinctively makes his choices wisely.

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