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Kolkata Sketchbook - Oindrilla Maity
The One Who Watches Cuckoos Flying Over the Nest
Lipika Sen is a pass out of the Kalabhavana, Shantiniketan. She had won the Camlin award of excellence in the Eastern Zone while still doing her Graduation, and consequently went for the Camlin Euro Tour, traveling extensively in Europe much before than most established artist can afford. A couple of group exhibitions added feathers to her cap since she has passed out in 2005. It was going on well so far, when she suddenly realized that it is ‘not going on so well’ with the future of her work. The galleries are not as keen as they were even a year back. Lipika kept on working on the rather huge canvases despite such refusals; her style evolving gradually and her friends getting pleasant surprises with her growth. But now it began to get really serious. She realized that she has not got a show during the last one year. To make matters worse her classmates at Shantiniketan who had moved on to Baroda for pursuing their Masters Degree, got bigger breaks and better promises. They have participated in international shows and hardly any group show in the city excludes them from its list. Mainul Sheikh is a common name in the Biennales in South East Asia and not to mention Sarmistha - she is already a celeb. But all the three were painting nearly in the same narrative mode. Why couldn’t she hit the bull’s eye, then?
Lipika went from one gallery to the other with CDs containing images of her work. Her work – they comprise of fantastical images rendered with an unambiguous flavor of the Russian fairy tales, with which all children of her time grew up with. There are images of stolid figures of both men and women, sometimes often too twisted; of her utopic love; of beasts – crouching tigers, prying felines, contorted swans; wispy curtains and sheers covering most of the picture plane, pertain an air of enigma to the work; with her own self engaged discreetly in probing her womanhood and promiscuity –she indulges in masturbation. Draped in intricately detailed diaphanous bed sheets – she sleeps, and wakes up only to find that she had stained them with the first signs of womanhood. There is blood on her bed spread and blood on her dress which she had just changed and left sprawling on the chair. Often she mocks at herself, mimicking her image with a pair of mustachios drawn on her face and wrapped in a dhoti. Hers are works of a being tormented with what one can justly call ‘identity crises’ – swinging between the harshness of the city and the somewhat mushy, sentimental life of a countryside. She could not for a long time comply with the city life after her return from the pristine life of Shantiniketan, where she had moved to eight years back; not until late. She was just out of high school then and the last impressions of the fairy tales from Russia do not necessarily spare one at that age. In fact they leave an indelible mark on most of us, which last us a life long.
But gallerists are formidable creatures. Powerful drawings and fantastical imageries are not always the criteria. Even if they have to sell dozens of the same everyday. Even if the whole of the present genre of artists produce the same. Why they keep refusing Lipika, why do her works get nearly to the point of invalidation is still a mystery. The ambiguity kept eating her every day, every minute, every second as she being somewhat recalcitrant kept on producing her canvases in an ambitious scale, most of which are gigantic diptyches. Each time eating up a considerable space of her studio.
Every morning she wakes up with a seed of anxiety about how she can get rid of the canvases. Every day, in a therapeutic venture she ends up resorting to a fresh canvas. Each day adding to the pile she already has at her disposal. Unnerved at her own orgy she called up her only art critic friend in the city she knew of – Iman Sarkar – her last resort.
Iman is a free lancer. Her popularity graph as an art writer is ascending at an alarming rate. She steals the show almost always at the openings. People swarm around her wanting to get introduced. The rule is same everywhere – everybody likes a hero. That apart, she has recently been attempting to start a parallel career as a practicing artist. Although after passing out two years ago from the city’s only post colonial art institution she had indulged herself in community and public art projects, which are seemingly vanguard practices and much in vogue among the recent genre of budding artists, she now wants to switch over to doing canvases for a couple of reasons. After all public art projects cannot earn an artist her living. Canvases do sell.
Iman painstakingly went through the pieces of the artist. The robustness of the canvases, the striking details and the powerful connotations did strike her, too. Lipika does render human situation in the most sublime and poignant way. Iman was touched. Bhupen Khakhar’s own pieces came to her mind –“You Cannot Satisfy Everyone”.
-“What do they tell you at the gallery?”
- “That my pieces are blatantly sexual and personal.”
- “How many artists they sell make impersonal works, Lipika?” Having said that Iman named quite a few who are highly saleable in Calcutta.
-“I do not know. I really don’t.” Lipika virtually was in tears now.
Giving her chum a lot of reassurance and encouragement as any moral supporter would do, Iman left for home. In fact, she herself has had a good dose of artistic impetus seeking Lipi’s canvases. She was just in need for someone for her to begin her canvases again. Since the last couple of months of her mental preparation (one needs a good cause for starting afresh) she had often wanted to portray how the middle class reality affects her. How she thinks of Das Kapital while gazing at the show windows at the city’s newly mushroomed malls. She was relentlessly making mental lay outs where to put a copy of a tattered Das Kapital amongst the images of the windows and how to paint all her family members having dinner at the table – coalescing the event with show windows. It would contain details of her father, paralysed at the left arm, and her sister with a somewhat deranged expression on her face, as she often suffers from nervous depression, and Mother of course, with a disheveled hair and creases over her face from the perpetual deep frowns, indicating her constant struggles for all the thirty-five years of her marriage and the underfed kittens that look up always when they sit at the table.
But no, now she really does not want to portray such a mushy family drama. That’s going to be too personal. The galleries would once again be insinuating. She does not want that. How to begin then? Should it be like the Kaur sisters – Amrit and Ravinder – who draw crowds of people from all walks of life; countless faces of celebrities – Madonna, Mother Teresa, and Princess Diana – all against a backdrop of a garden with the minutest details as the Mughal miniatures would have it – an Asian experience of the world? Iman began to feel taxed and dizzy. She felt like last night’s party – she was sick with the chicken nuggets and wanted to puke.
After about an hour, she brought out two canvases. She sat before the two blank canvases and at about three past ten in the morning came out of her studio, walking heavily towards the bedroom. Of the two canvases, on which she has just begun to work, one comprised of outlined images of her family sitting at the table, next to them are high-rise malls with a copy of the Das Kapital looming from behind. On the other was outlined in bold letters the word ‘COCA COLA’ which was to be painted against a rich red background. Around it swarmed a number of outlined faces of Madonna, Elvis, Diana, Pervez Musharraf and her own. She belongs to her drab household. She drinks a most celebrated brand, too. Fragmented identity. That’s what she shares. That’s Postmodernism. Her license to do just anything. Nobody can claim hierarchy anymore. She has become a POMO artist overnight.
(The names of all characters in the article, though not necessarily fictitious, have been changed)
