Finding Nests for Wandering Birds

Thiruvannamalai based artist Gayatri Gamuz has absorbed the Indian philosophical vision of Vasudhaiva Kudumbakam (World itself is Home) and Loka Samasta Sukhino Bavantu (Let all Beings be Happy and Prosperous) in her life and paintings. Gayatri speaks to JohnyML about her works and her involvement with art and philosophy. Excerpts:

JohnyML: Gayatri Gamuz. This sounds like a ‘fusion’ name. How and why did you choose this name? What is your real name? And how much this name articulates your philosophical and artistic personality?

Gayatri Gamuz: Gayatri is the name me and my husband Anand were choosing for our first child in case of being a girl. A boy was born and Anand started calling me Gayatri .I was never keen on changing my name while being in India, but when it happened I understood that an Indian name creates an intention to be closer to the people here so I felt it was good. This had happened thirteen years back so it is very normal for me to be Gayatri now. Still, when I go to Spain I keep my original name, my family and old friends call me Inma and Gayatri is used only as my artistic name.             I never thought about my personality as being connected with either of my names.
          
JML: In one of your catalogues, you have stated that your works tend to capture an inverted view of the world. Why do you think so?

GG: This was a collection called “In reverse I tell so you understand me”. The world is changing fast and unfortunately there are many reasons to feel the irreversible ‘upside downess’ of the human/world.

 The consequences of the sacrifice of the earth for the immediate needs of the humans are seen daily in graphics and statistics and news all over the world. I talk about it in a poetic way through my paintings, as a mirror of what we humans are and how we relate with other beings and with the earth.

JML: Your paintings are like your name, chanting of a mantra, so deep with a lot of resonances. Do you think so?

GG: I like the intense deep poetic quality in any art form.  I consider deepness an essential element in my work. Eduardo Chillida said that “there is no art without poetry in it”.

When we see the world with a deep understanding it becomes another world; and same with people, issues, conversations, animals and plants. ’Deep’ means attention, it means ‘stopping and observing’ instead of ‘passing and looking’. The velocity of things is destroying the quality of ‘the moment’. This is the craziness of the modern world and of the modern man, the “man in a hurry”.

JML: Gayatri, you seem to have a rejected a homo-centric world in your works. However, the point of departure looks like quite human centric. Why is it so?

GG: One day, I went for a walk with my two children to a small hill to see the sunset. As we reached the top and sat looking at the orange sky we were amazed to see that we were not the first visitors, just two hundred meters away, there was a big group of monkeys, around thirty, who were also, like us, quiet in silence, sitting and looking towards the sun. Thus I got the inspiration for “Meditations on life and death”, a painting of a monkey sitting on the head of a man who is meditating .When this painting was exhibited  some people in the public told me that  it was a ”nice” painting  but it was also a “little disturbing”.

 The only way to recover the sanity of the world and the balance of human and nature is by dropping the ego-mind superiority of the human and by recognizing the equality with the whole. In my paintings, the human gets together and melts with other beings and other elements from nature in a high consciousness of deep understanding, of an elemental urgent understanding of intentions.

JML: Definitions are always funny and limiting. Still I would say that you have an eco-centric philosophy explained or dealt with in your works. Could you please tell something about your environmental concerns?

My belief is that ecological concerns are not anymore the monopoly of a few individuals. My environmentalism is just a natural process which goes together with a deep change of consciousness of the full humanity towards a process of regeneration of the human and the earth.

In my adolescence and student times I was on the side of ecological and nature activism, but only while living in India  I understood nature with a deeper meaning through the strong experience of living in rural areas of South India and through Ananda’s teachings on pagan philosophy. I also got involved in the socio-ecological campaigns and activities he was leading in Cochin, particularly the Annual Tree planting and Tree Festival.

JML: Flat surfaces with dominant figures suddenly get destabilized by the incorporation of animal or bird imageries. Sometimes they look very schematic. Do you follow a scheme in the works?

GG: I do not like complicated images, even if I wanted I could not do them.

I like to be understood not just by the exclusive public who is supposed to know  about art. One time, while I was doing a painting of a big human face with a  nest of birds in the mouth, a village woman entered my studio and saw the painting and started laughing noisily like I never saw anybody laughing. She was putting her hand on her mouth and clapping. She was laughing with her full expressive body up and down. I was amazed. I did not know what it was all about but that day I had an experience that I would never have in an exhibition hall.

Yes, I will admit also that some times it does not completely work like we wish or want to believe. The other day I got a letter from my father which said “Yes, your mother and me like your paintings a lot but sorry my daughter, I have to tell you that your paintings are more rare than a blue dog” (it is an expression in Spanish). Then I thought: Oh!, my father has not visited enough galleries and museums.

JML: You have lived in Kochi and later you decided to live in Thiruvannamalai. From the commercial hub to a spiritual hub. How do you assess this transition?

GG: I do not feel that I belong to any hub, nor to any system. Artists are kind of rare people from birth itself. I like to think that I am free, that is how I chose to go on being an artist, even if it was never easy.

But for me, Kochi is not just about commerce. Kochi has been evolving with environmentalism and art together since the 90’s when galleries like Kashi and Dravidia started functioning. Anand and myself were involved with ‘Encounter’, the first Contemporary Art Festival in Kochi and with the Tree Festival. Senior artists like K.G.Subramanian, A.Ramachandran and Nalini Malani participated in these exhibitons.  The immense contribution of artists like Babu Xavier, Abul Kalam Azad and Suresh Jayaram made it literally a movement and when Bose Krishnamachari and the ‘Bombay Boys’ came on the scene everything took off. The rest is history and everyone knows about it.

JML: Before asking the previous question, I should have asked you something like this: How do you articulate your Spanish culture within the Indian ethos? Or have you fully adapted to the Indian culture and have become an ‘Indian’?

GG: There is no question of adapting fully to any culture, again for the same reason as that in the last question. When we live for a long time away from our country of origin we belong just to nowhere and at the same time to everywhere. As a child, because of my father’s job, I grew up moving from one town to another every two years. Naturally, myself and my sisters grew up without being attached to any town, friends, schools etc. Somehow this non-attachment made me understand the world as a big space full of humans which are of very similar characteristics.

Yes, I love Indian culture, Indian aesthetics, food, music and people. India is such a vibrant, alive and different country. Because I have been already 15 years here or maybe also because my children are half Indian I feel one with this land in many respects. But still my skin is white and I don’t pretend to belong here or to feel that India is mine. I always say that I am a long time tourist in India, even on the planet, but this is part of another subject.

JML: Interestingly, your works do not have any Spanish quality in them, I mean a trait that is typical of a European artist. Why is it so? (if at all I see a European trait, that is the non-deliberate surrealistic inclination in some of the paintings)

GG: I never really analyze my paintings or myself from the point of view of being Spanish but you may be right in doing so. I do not think that to be non Indian is a very important element in my work. The surrealistic inclination comes naturally. It has to do with the subconscious and with the intention of poetry which moves from the real ‘real’ to another poetic reality. I live in India so what I create is of “Indian origin”. Wherever you are is more important than where you are from. A painting done in Spain is not the same than a painting done in India, even if we want to talk just about the weather conditions.

JML: How do you select your themes and images? …

GG: By obsession. Most of the day with the feeling of what to paint, how to finish this painting, how to get the best of this image etc., I feel that the most delicate job of an artist is not to know what to paint but to know what not to paint. There are millions of images which could be done but only a few which should be the chosen ones. This is the important part, the correct choice.

I celebrate the return of realistic, hyper realist and figurative in the contemporary art practice. I also relate to the search for the tenderness in the human spirit which I find amazingly expressed, for example in the photography of Rineke Dijkstra, in the paintings of Gottfried Helnwein and in the sculptures of Ron Mueck.

JML: What decides your palette, theme or the moment of execution?

GG: Everything is quite illogical. Sometimes I think I am in the best spirit and I am going to have a wonderful day and make the greatest work and then nothing happens and days that look dull end up being great and fruitful.

JML: I would call you a settled wanderer who carries the memories of those paths that you have covered. They are heavy paintings. Each painting is a symbolic caravan. Comment please.

GG: I am still a wanderer without a house of my own and may continue to be so.  Sometimes when people ask me how long I took to do this painting I say that it took all my life till now.

JML:  Please talk about your current concerns and future projects

GG: Lately I have been persistently obsessed about a field to explore and paint about; a picture of a dreamy world of a land without trees. It is about the supposition of being on a land without trees and how the human relates to this new situation. The symbolic desert land is a physical reality, which we constantly experience in all what represents and proves our destructive, infinite, indefatigable energy. It is also an imaginary reality of a world inside the World, the virtual world carried inside us that hurts deeply in our consciousness, in our intelligent brains, in our human identity.