Saturday, November 4, 2017
Rewarding journey of a deep and
lonely patience
Dheere Dheere Re Mana, Dheere Sub Kucch
Hoye
Mali Seenche Sau Ghara, Ritu Aaye Phal Hoye
[Be slow O mind, slowly everything happens
Gardener may water garden a hundred times,
When the season comes, there is fruit.]
Kabirdas
[English version: James Khan]
Medieval poet Kabir has always been very close to artist Santosh
Verma’s heart. He was born in 1956 in the Matigaon village near Varanasi. His
father was a great devotee of Kabir. Verma has even named his son after the
poet. Kabir has completely sunk in his psyche. He has also felt spiritually
drawn to Kabir’s village Lahartara. The couplets of Kabir, who was born into a
family of weavers, are quite simple at one level but on another level quite
complex. Kabir becomes our contemporary when we set out to understand Verma’s
art and his abstracts. The Kabir who can come up with a sharp commentary on a
manipulative society can also convey a profound message on love through his
singular couplets. For Verma the influence of Kabir is not a subject of
research; he has always been in his life, on his tongue, has remained embedded
deep in his art.
Verma spent the first 13 years of his life in his village. His
loneliness and patience were the key aspects of this early phase. His elder
brother was far too elderly – almost a father figure. While his companions
enjoyed the raucous spontaneity of childhood, Verma would spend time in the
garden during summer afternoons to reflect over and make sense of his
loneliness. This experience has a decisive significance for Verma’s art and his
characteristic abstracts. Little patches of sunlight on the ground of the dense
garden led to a magical game of light and shade!
Kabir’s couplet quoted above speaks of patience. As a child Verma
would shun his playmates indulging in horseplay and would sit with his fishing
rod, patiently waiting for the fish to take the bait. He had only two passions
– swimming and fishing with a lot of patience. One day he landed such a big
fish that it was impossible for a child like him to pull it out single-handed.
A passing gypsy helped him out. But whereas Verma considered his landing a big
fish a great achievement, the gypsy was keen on taking it home to cook. He left
the child with his mother and took away the fish. But then returned one day and
handed him a little tambourine made of that fish’s skin.
It is indeed a joy to understand Verma’s mature art of today
through the medium of such reminiscences. Verma’s art is entirely devoid of any
western sources. Painters like Gaitonde and Ambadas were his favourites since
their abstracts are firmly rooted in the Indian earth.
A couple of years ago I was wandering in the maze of giant
canvases carrying contemporary American abstracts spread across many large
halls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On the way out, near the exit, I
saw a small room and suddenly noticed a medium-sized canvas of Gaitonde which
was a pleasant shock. That was the Indian earth of abstract art.
I have been seeing Verma’s abstracts since their inception and
have been his admirer. He has kept himself away from the promotional tricks and
gimmickry of Modern Art. In his village school the team of inspectors was
astonished to see his drawings on the school walls. He received his art
education in Varanasi and was once left speechless on seeing, at an exhibition,
an abstract in black done by Jeram Patel. This experience changed the entire
course of his life. However, patience is the basic element of Verma’s art.
At the 1992 Biennale at Bharat Bhavan when eminent artists like
Ghulam Rasool Santosh gave an award to Verma’s abstract watercolour, he finally
seemed to have found his path. Initially he explored his unique imagination in
black and white but he had an uncanny ability to play with colours as well.
Ghulam Rasool Santosh was a master of colour and he inspired the young artist
to struggle not with ten or twenty canvases but with hundreds of them.
The amazing use of brown (whether light or dark) and green colours
in the works in Verma’s latest exhibition particularly impressed me. One has to
enter this world with patience. To put it in Kabir’s words, “The fruit of life
come on its own time.”
VINOD BHARDWAJ
Art Critic
It was 1992,
I had visited Bharat Bhavan for the All India Biennale. An awarded painting
snatched my attention. It was an abstract but was distinctly different from
what I saw around. There was a new thought process and implementation technique
on the canvas. I inquired about the artist and referred his details to Mrs.
Sushma Mahendra Jain, the then owner of Dhoomimal Art Centre.
Long after
one fine day a slim shy young man came searching for me to my drawing room. I
had not met him earlier. He introduced himself as Santosh Verma and the
painting at the Bharat Bhavan flashed in my mind. So this was the young man
with fresh thought behind the canvas. The long chat that ensued revealed the
influences that touched his mind. He was from Varanasi, born and brought up
amidst nature. I realized the fluidity in his paintings were the reflections
nature that he imbibed into himself. I observed him and his paintings journey
in abstraction through the years as he won many awards and accolades.
SHANTI DAVE
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