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

Dialogue with Nature

 Santosh Verma’s paintings represent human mind’s deep engagement with the reality that is abstract and concrete at the same time. I think his painting is continuously evolving with the expanding horizon of his consciousness. In his paintings one can read his journey from the place where he was born and became conscious of his existence for the first time to the place where he is encountering the complex metropolitan culture. These places are not merely geographical areas but they are simultaneously cultural and philosophical fields. The changing shapes and deepening colours in his paintings indicate his encounter with this new field which is a significant constituent of today’s globalizing world where chaos is the order of the day and his paintings reflect the human longing to search for order. It is in this sense that the language of the painter and that of the nature overlap or meet and invite the humans to ‘feel for the things themselves’. 

 This makes Santosh as one of the representative voices from India whose paintings resonate with the Latin American counterparts on its claim for authenticity of the experience and resistance to the globalizing universalism. The emerging social reality in the metropolitan city spaces is determined by the market relations, machines and feelings of painful transitions. Santosh proves the Jungian point that  human psyche has a certain autonomy vis-à-vis the immediate material matrix as his recent paintings continue to defy the logic of the urban space to a great extent and remain linked with the enchanting mysteries of nature. One is reminded of the image of a kite flier whose kite is flying high in the sky but the thread is still in his hand.   

 In this sense Santosh Verma’s paintings represent the emerging thought process in India reflected in the contemporary art, literature and social science together, which derives its energy from within, from the authenticity of its relationship with the social reality that one belongs to and from the commitment one has to its constitution and transformation. If tomorrow it would be possible to draw a pattern in this alternative thought process that the world requires today from the expressions of experiences in India reality, Santosh Verma’s paintings would be considered as one of the pioneers in this. I can see something emerging at a very abstract level of ideas that might challenge the very foundations of the modernity without lapsing into postmodernity. I can see a new world of ideas emerging which is trying to reclaim the existential aspects of human beings in which a creative dialogue could be initiated between ‘humans and nature’, ‘mind and body’, and ‘individual and society’. In the field of painting Santosh Verma will be known for articulating this metamorphosis.        

Dr. Manindra Nath Thakur

Centre for Political Studies

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi