Art: Karma Tenrab ~ the eternal seeker

(I wrote this catalogue essay for a solo show by Karma Tenrab at the Mahua gallery, Bangalore, in 2003)

 

WHAT are the footsteps of life about? Perhaps a search for quintessence. Of journeys, of destinations, both of the soul and the body. Of the eternal quest for the deep silence within. Of living in the moment.

Each religion embodies tenets of these positive energies, the dharmic pathways to personal renaissance. In today’s fragmented, embattled world, it is not surprising that Sikkim-born Karma Tenrab has chosen to enshrine the ways of the Buddha, the sanctuary at his lotus feet, through these serene, faith-led acrylic and oil paintings, a far cry from his earlier abstract works.

To the artist, at 27, his images couch the Savakabuddhas (Pali), the enlightened disciples who gain nirvana by learning of dharma from a Samyakshambuddha, who embodies correct and harmonious knowledge.

Karma’s images, steeped in pilgrimage and nascent learning, lure the viewer towards an inner light. Towards the true pulse of living, away from egocentric achievement and materialism. Towards being an eternal child of light.  Or following the eight-fold Buddhist path of enlightenment, embracing meditative, introspective and life-affirming practices.     

On these large canvases, Karma raises a tumult of questions. About life. About belonging. About being.

Was the Buddha one, or many? Is the latent divine being within us like a dead tree that is waiting to bloom once more? Can listening to the silence imbue each moment with meaning? Does the quest for infinite truth illuminate the seeker from within? Can one walk on the true path with worldly strings attached? If we control our emotions, can we morph into new age Enlightened Ones? Do we constantly erect barricades around us that distance us from the truth?

These potent yet poetic artistic meditations with flat, unicolour backgrounds may seem intriguing in one so young. What triggered them? Some cues emerge from Karma’s jottings for his first solo show – ‘The Sacred Space’ – in New Delhi in February 2007, and from a December 2007 telephone conversation from near Belgaum.

As from a misty Sikkim inscape, Karma emerges by slow degrees. As a Gangtok schoolboy of three or four, whose playmates were the child monks from the Rumtek, Tsuklakhang, and Enchey gompas or monasteries. As a teenaged student, clad in a traditional baku, who attended twice-a-week thangka painting classes at the Enchey School. As the child of parents who were committed to education, a son whose joy was to sketch and paint all day. As a student of electronics and telecommunication at the Sikkim Manipal University for a two brief years, where the walls and fans of his hostel room bore testimony to his creative urge. And so, down a long and winding route, he found himself at the famed art school at Baroda.       

In November 2002, Karma set out in search of himself. He left art school. He ‘took refuge’ with Bod Rinpoche, and did a pilgrimage to six holy sites, including Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, Nalanda and Kushinagar.

This resulted in an earlier series of black-and-white acrylic canvases on Buddhist themes. But their iconography is individual. They do not hark back to the classic cave paintings of Ajanta or the perfectly-proportioned massive sculpted figures at Ellora. Nor to the aniconic representations of Amravathi. Or even the anthropomorphic representations at Gandhara, with their Greco-Buddhist syncretism, or the art at Mathura, which traced a common lineage under the Kushan rulers. Idealizing the realistic, these images fused the immediately human with divine serenity.

Karma’s influences could derive from an eastern curve, along the Silk Road though the northern Mahayana route that traversed Central Asia, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Korea and Japan. Or the southern Theravada route through Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Celebrations of local-impacted Buddhist iconography are spectacular for both their range and their execution. Take the now-destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas. Or the Cambodian temple complex at Angkor Wat. Or the geometrical, almost abstract figures from the 13^th century Thai ethnic kingdom of Sukhothai, followed by the sumptuous garments and jeweled ornamentation of the Bodhisattvas in the gilded temples of the Ayutthaya period that followed. Or the magnificence of the Borobudur temple in Indonesia, built around 780-850 AD.

It is against this backdrop of Asian traditions that Karma’s paintings must be scanned. Does he trace his lineage directly from traditional thangka paintings? Or the secret significance of the mandala? Or a luminous descent from the Bodhisattvas? Or the untraced stories embodied within stupas at Sanchi? Or the serene, healing smile of the Dalai Lama, still positive in exile?

Karma’s colour-controlled, monotheistic renditions are impelled by light. By the grace that underlies a search for the divine. By glancing back over his shoulder at the gompas of Sikkim, their fluttering prayer flags and wheels, the chants that pulse through the cool air. By an awareness of all the Buddhist iconography that has guided him to the present state. By contemporary media that make for greater permanence, such as acrylic.  

Acrylic on canvas, 42x42 inches.

“What Buddha means to me is beyond fascination. That’s where I would wish to take anyone who would see this exhibition. Not a mere display of content we are familiar with, but rather a feeling that is evoked by coming across anything that emanates that divine energy,” Karma wrote about his black-and-white acrylic canvases in early 2007.

In this series, he guides the viewer away from well-trodden paths. Towards a quasi-philosophical, semi-aesthetic lens on the Buddha. Towards questioning pathways to harmony, winding bylanes to asceticism, in a materialistic era. Towards art as a means of self-realization.

These are the most vital reasons to engage with Karma’s work. He may not strive towards the spareness of Zen, or the quicksilver essence of a haiku or Chinese calligraphy. But his paintings are deeply imbued with earnestness, with eternal seeking.

Namo buddham sharanam gacchami.

Namo dharmam sharanam gacchami.

Namo sangham sharanam gacchami.   

Art: Sacred Spaces ~ abstracts by Shivani Dugar

'Midst': 22 x 42 in. each, Oil on linen canvas

(I wrote this catalogue essay on Shivani's abstract paintings for the Mahua Gallery, Bangalore, in 2009)

Still centre of the unknown

(An encounter with the abstract paintings of Shivani Dugar)

  

Abstract paintings are fictitious models because they visualize a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we may nevertheless conclude exists.

                                                                                                      ~ Gerhard Richter

There is a sense of atmosphere, there is an approximation of music and, what is most important, there is a throbbing mystery about the very process of viewing and responding as if one is sucked into some still centre of hitherto unknown experience.

                                                ~ R.L. Bartholomew on V.S. Gaitonde’s abstract paintings

Abstraction in art often seems inexplicable. Or permeated by an unimaginable secret code. It seems ever-changing, like wispy clouds that morph and waft and vanish into forever. Or the surge in the depths of an indigo vat. Perhaps like the drifting icebergs off Antarctica that seem of the southern continent, yet above and beyond it. Like the chattering of squirrels, a twittering of birds in a cherry tree outside a bay window, unfathomable to the lay ear, yet cogent within its world.

This intrinsic subtext imbues the paintings of artists who veer away from the tried, the tested, the tangible. They brush past the figurative, the immediately cognizable, the near-photographic modes of representation. Instead, their outward expressions delve into their innermost chambers, where thought and emotion integrate into a terrain that changes colour and pulse with the moodiness of inner Ladakh landscapes. Such creative spirits take the viewer on a near-yogic journey into the sense of essence, the breadth of breath, the calm core within infinite flux.

Shivani Dugar’s passage to light, to the realization of her own artistic pulse, turns more than a sidelong glance at Richter and Gaitonde, at their mastery of the metier. For her oils on canvas today have emerged as meditations on nature, as wordless paeans to the beautiful unsung, to its unnamed hues, its intrinsic moods, vistas, melodies.

Her landscapes travel deep, into silences beyond forms and themes, bounding over mountains and rivers, seascapes and ocean drifts, the legacy of leaves, stem and bark, the loamy-sandy history of soil. She chooses hues that have yet to be named, terrain yet unrecognized, almost inter-galactic interstices, yet serenely poised within its own certainty.   

Shivani’s certainty has been sculpted by her artistic explorations. For instance, by watching her mother paint at home, by imbibing her spiritual inclinations, the meditative chakras as visualized through landscapes – where, for instance, red embodies the earth, orange the water, green the air, purple stands for space, and so on.

Her galvanic change from within became an electrifying force when she relocated to New York City, where she did a Master’s in printmaking at the Pratt Institute. Shivani was drawn into the whirlpool of the art, its cross-hatching, its intricate linear passages, the gentle planar quality of lithography, the uncertainty that was built into the practice. She learnt to eschew the decorative for muted innate expressions. She veered away from architectural forms to paint from feeling while engaging with natural planes and spatial relationships.

En route, Shivani sought to express the awesome magnitude of landscapes, but in an individual, unconventional way. She would mull over Gaitonde’s paintings, seek out their infinite communication through an indecipherable code. Equally, she delved into the world of Richter, his multi-track evolution, his nuanced questionings, his breakaway forays from photo-paintings into abstraction. That led her to other voices with similar souls, like Somenath Maity. Or the UK-based magic realism, the chimerical qualities of Canada-born Peter Doig, who often pays tribute to Le Corbusier.

         Her art is deeply rooted in reminiscence, but not for the immediate past or for distant dreams. Instead, her yearnings stem from nature. Her canvases gaze inwards at an atavistic past, at omnipresence on a solular journey centuries ago, at meditation on transience, even on inner certitude. 

Detail from 'Search': 40x40 in, oil on linen canvas

        Shivani’s moods, once abstracted, reflect those of the seashell that sings of an inner surge, of the butterfly bound for the cloud on horizon, of the blue beetle that claims the clinging vine as home. She expresses nishabd or the voiceless through banded, ever-layered hues, through prismatic seeings into the unseen.

        Light imbues her delving into the darkness, almost like a deep sea diver in search of the rarest of pearls. But unlike that simplest of passages, Shivani’s ebb and surge, quietitude and implosions, take the viewer back to a classic Indian concept: that of the trinity of the deities Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, who represent creation, dissolution and regeneration.  

      Distilling essences seems to be Shivani’s forte. Like her illustrious predecessors in abstract art, she evokes the transcendental, the timeless, the contemplative and the poetic. Amidst these trajectories, she binds yet unwinds the flexi-connections between the earth and the sky, the rocks and the ripples, the space and the sea, the sunset and the moonbeam, the inner quiet and the outer retort. For can these ever be expressed in word or photograph, on stage or on screen? Perhaps not. For only painted abstractions or soaring music can do them justice.

       This truth has been proved before by art stalwarts like Anselm Kiefer and Achuthan Kudallur, Jackson Pollock and Nasreen Mohamedi, Sam Francis and Viswanadhan V.. Perhaps Shivani feels in sync with what Pollock once said of his experience: “When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” And maybe she connects as easily with Kiefer's words: “All painting but also all literature...is merely a process of going round and round something inexpressible...”

      It is the inexpressible moment that Shivani expresses through her broad strokes, her inner gaze. She is in her paintings, as much as of them, and yet a meditative detachment steeps through them. She participates and alters, visualizes and demystifies, allowing the intuitive impulse, the non-imagistic ground, the overlayers of pulse on the serene first coat, to break free, to breathe, even to just be.

     For, to Shivani, her abstract landscapes are often about air, fire, earth, water, and space, essentially “their depths, emotions, moods, the warmth, the coolness, the movements, the drama, the unseen,” as she couches it in words. Her textures and tones hint at the unheard, the unseen, the untouched.

    Shivani’s intent remains both subliminal yet spirited, with spirituality at its core. Submerged within, subsumed by natural abeyance, her intelligence grapples with the moment with intensity yet respect, with both bhakti and shringara, resulting in cadences that speak with the rasa of Odissi, the unheard notes of the shehnai, and the thunder of a waterfall, all intermingled in a moment. Perhaps that is her fiction, her reality, the call to her persona from the still centre of the unknown.