Rooted in Reality
Away from the maddening crowd of Kolkata lives the veteran artist Bhaskar Mukherjee. Shy of fame and flashlights, Mukherjee lives in a Santhal village in Santiniketan. Oindrilla Maity meets him when he is in Kolkata for his solo show. She reviews the show and chats with the artist to get a glimpse of his life and philosophy.
Bhaskar Mukherjee |
It becomes a moot point to think of globalization, market circuits or the leveling effects of no-history, no-place phenomenon while viewing Bhaskar Mukherjee’s work. His transgression from the typical stylization still in vogue in the post- colonial institution in Kolkata where he had his training in the Visual Arts is what had interested me to take a closer look at them. While the Government College of Art and Crafts has almost undergone stagnation in the creative circuit with its hackneyed curricular and methodologies, Mukherjee’s endeavor is undoubtedly enterprising and engaging at the same time. His paintings and drawings (and sculptures as well) are a result of a recluse life - away from the city’s din and the commercial hub of creative activity. I had a chance of meeting the artist at a city gallery one sultry afternoon while his show ‘Rooted in Realism’ was still on (Gallery Kanishka’s, Kolkata, 9 may – 2 June). A two and a half hours chat with this somewhat introvert artist revealed a lot more than his work has had to offer.
Despite Birbhum being the major locus of his work, it was elsewhere that marked his point of departure. Once his Masters degree at the Government Art College was over, Mukherjee left for Deoghar in Bihar with a job of teaching art at the Ramakrishna Mission. But soon gave up his career in teaching in a frenzy to break free from the concept of academic training and teaching in the same process, and started afresh a full time career in art. At length he bought a plot in Shantiniketan and settled there, amidst the rusticity of the pristine village. His apparently archaic works, too, bear that rustic, archaic smell strongly. His is therefore not the concern that a city based artist quite habitually features. Neither is the body-city relationship or such issues make their prominence felt in his works.
Bhaskar Mukherjee works predominantly with black and white giving his pieces a graphical effect. Only sparingly does he use a patch of yellow here and a dash of ochre there. His images thereby emerge from a bleak world that forms a metaphor for decadence of humanity. His strong, bold and powerful brushstrokes are frenzied marks left on paper and canvas. However, despite his fervent strokes, the images retain their distinct, manifest contours. The artist often paints faces confronting each other – but almost completely obscured – veiled in darkness. ‘ That’s owing to the fall of humanity and a moribund society. Humanity is now in question. The images therefore, are bleak and blurred occasionally. The distorted images are metaphor to such decadence.”
Mukherjee’s portraits are mounted in the show are highly charged emotionally and that accounts for his images turning out to be almost grotesque. He emphasizes,“ I am deeply inspired by the German Expressionists - Emil Nolde, Munch and Paul Klee. Matisse and Souza too, have influenced me considerably.”
The artist recalls his day at the Government Art College, where he was not spared a rigorous training in academic realism in a post-colonial time. “I had to learn how to make a canvas and how to paint it after the conventional fashion.” But soon he began to look for newer ways of representation. “My settling down in the distant land of Deoghar had perhaps solved it all.” - says he. The huge library at the Ramakrishna Mission freed from the city’s crowd and the countless hills that formed the rugged terrain were his favourite spots for his solitary expedition. Often he would discover a pebble, break open it and to his surprise would discover a small capsule of luminous blue, terra verte, emerald green or yellow ochre inside it. “ They were such brilliant hues you know!” – an excited Mukherjee raises his brows high. The creases on his forehead deepen and he stretches open his fingers to simulate a sparkling star. It was a new schooling for him – a point of departure – nursed completely by nature.
A little later, he resigned from the mission and came started off for Shantiniketan. While in Bihar the ‘harijans’ were his subjects, in Shantiniketan the aboriginals - the Santhals now became his subject. Their broad noses, pendulous lips and tanned skin married his anguished and fervent strokes in black. The somewhat archaic features of these people helped in the distorted image making. His subjects in the show included drawings of animals such as a goat’s face with a somewhat queer expression on it; a dog with its tongue lolling out; zoomorphic creatures; a smiling portrait of a Santhal girl; grinning faces of men in deep suspicion or anguished, tortured portraits marking the dissemination of violence by which this era is essentially victimized and masked faces that hide their real motives - almost all of them on rather small square canvases.
“ But how could you bring about a complete change shedding off that institutionalized training which your contemporaries as well as the younger artists from the same schooling failed to do?” I inquired. In answer he told me a short Chinese story about an art teacher and his pupil. The student was asked to draw a cat, but each time he produced it the teacher remonstrated and kept stressing on the fact to ‘see’ it and not just ‘look’ at it. “That’s what we lack today. You’ll have to learn to see for hours with wonders. Nature had taught me that,” says the artist. “My lesson in art started the day when as a youngster I once found in our attic a lizard hatchling coming out its shell it had just broken open – its frail body whizzed past me in a flash of a second and left me whetted in the drab room – the very moment it dawned upon me - this is life! And I have had never to look back since then.” |
