Art in Waste
"I have been struggling with colours and forms for about forty years, and my career may be divided into two distinct phases. In the first half, I painted portraits, landscapes, abstracts et al and won some note. In the latter half, I almost gave up painting, because I began to discover forms and colours whichever way I turned, in charcoal, areca nuts, machine parts, rags, broomsticks, discarded slippers, bamboo pieces, dried-up bark, wood shavings and so on.
May be it's a rationalization, but I argued like this, if I decided to paint a horse or a hen, I could paint it only in a limited number of ways, the limits being set by the matrix of my vision, the grains within my flabby gray matter. Nature, on the other hand, is protean. Its forms are wrought out of limitless media and its repertoire of matrices is limitless too. Nature has painted its horses amongst ephemeral clouds and has embedded them in rocks for all geological time. Wood and rock and vapour have a mind of their own so far as form is concerned; their own characteristic strokes, grains, lies of force, magnetic fields. It is all painted out there, and the human painter has only to retouch it, chip it, turn it around and observe it in all its variety and ambiguity. (Remember "Behold the lilies of the field" etc.?) If the artist is putting up an exhibition, he has also to 'enframe' it. But the enframing too is a loss, for then one cannot turn those works around and observe the myriad forms back and front and sideways.
This in brief is my creed. It may be objected that it concedes too much to Nature and too little to human creativity. But I would only add in reply that painting, like poetry, may have by now reached the end of its tether, and it is only when the outside world breaks in upon the stuffy precincts of art that art would now be rejuvenated. Of course, I do not make any tall claims for my works. But I have felt a whiff of freshness when I have allowed these outside winds to blow in upon me. I have been happy to realign my grains, like iron filings, so what they may conform to the grains of my media."
