ESSAY

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Contemplative Spaces

Mumbai based Sheetal Ghattani is appreciated for her vibrant abstract paintings. For her abstraction is not about formlessness. It is all about reality of the present. Dr.Ashrafi Bhagat goes through the works of the artist and says why her works impart the viewer with a feeling of uniqueness.

Artistic Configurations
Sheetal Gattani is a Mumbai based artist well acknowledged nationally for her singular abstract paintings.  A Mumbaikar, living in a densely populated urban space, a megapolis capable of drowning and overwhelming one’s sensibilities with visual and aural stimuli, she produces paintings that are a complete polarity to her ambient environs.  Her studio is located in the thick commercial pocket of Mumbai where chaotic vibrations are the order of the day, but she creates a cocoon around her to weave the magic of the moment through a dialogue with her tools and materials.  Transcending the material chaos, she is able to open up the space to find a haven in her inner world, focusing on this reality to create a corpus of works that remain truly original and innovative. 

A post graduate in painting from Sir J.J. School of Arts, with enhanced training in Diploma in art Education, she initiated her career as an art teacher in her alma mater; where she creatively interacted with children of age group from ten to fifteen.  Simultaneously with her teaching career she continued to paint working on small size square paper.  Realizing the moribund state of her pedagogic career [eight years], she decided to venture fully with her art practice.  These were the formative years of her artistic/creative life that witnessed enormous challenges as she came to grip with her materials and technique, creating paper works through mediation with water colours.  This was the period in which she allowed herself to think through the medium, her ability to think thoughtfulness and deprivatized it through her labour intensive working method that involved brushing in layers of thin colours.

Encountering and confronting her abstracts, one is left puzzled, since they are not confounded confusion of splash of colours, in an attempt at ‘representing’ the celebration of the life of her city.  Her frames come across as structures of quiet breathing colours and spaces which are invested with her experiential semantics and not old fashioned formalism.  Since, a seismic shift has occurred in the regime of representation, with system of signification and possibilities of signs producing different meanings; it has led to signs being differently interpreted to produce either any meaning to have an effect or to create an effect.  The practice of artistic creation is both a movement towards the production of meaning and an inscription of a play beyond communicable meaning that is evocative at other levels than the communicative.  This is where Sheetal signposts her singularity embedded as she is within the matrix of her culture, creating her own version of abstraction that offers myriad possibilities of its explorations.
                                                                                       
The process
Sheetal’s process of creation, largely conditions the nature and character of her works.  Her works privileges the act of art-making, of the painter’s body in action over time.  The product of that activity is her visual field, not a visual form.  By this act she creates a field that calls to attention the visual fantasy of the viewer but also reflects upon the visual fantasy of herself the ‘embodied maker’.  In this respect her works bear affinities to abstract expressionists where the practice was about the body that laboured to produce art.  The paintings Sheetal produces are the labour of love and involvement very intimately connected with the movement of vision in space and body.  Yet there are no gestural evidences of brush strokes or any other traces or mark on the surface of her works.  Sheetal clarifies this depersonalization as “I feel almost egoistic leaving my marks or traces of the brush strokes on the paper”.  The decentering of the self by the artist through these material evidences lends her abstractions that spirited dynamism and power, approaching monumentality.

The material she dominantly employed was black paper on which she brushed on layers of paint washes, completely in communion with her materials and tools.  Through a process that can lead to many accidents, these are completely passed over to integrate with the work.  With her contemplative textured surfaces, Sheetal builds up layers and layers of thin paint [twelve sometimes] that in the end leaves an illusive impression of her self, in which she has lived metaphorically to gently push her moments to make them live on the paper.  And this form of abstraction is clarified by Sheetal, “Abstraction is in its deepest sense, based on realism, as in reality- reality of the present moment, free from any thoughts, memory conditioning…only that pure present moment existing.  So painting is a ‘time-manifested’ process and I become only a means”.

Her negation of worldly reality is aimed at negotiating only with her materials and tools to create forms of formlessness in which she wishes to meld everything together without having to think or ruminate on any experiences. The reality for Sheetal is her involvement in the ‘present moment’ where she ‘deconditions’ herself when confronted by the tabula rasa of the paper and like a neophyte with all innocence, initiates her journey with paint and brushes.  The aesthetic intellectual engagement is not without objectivity.

Recent works: A Critique
Exploration for Sheetal remains at the heart of her works; with materials and tools conditioning her very act and process of evocation and provocation to create changing vocabularies and new patterns.  Since Sheetal’s philosophy of artistic act is premised on the “moment”, she capitalizes on that transient temporality by capturing and living in that present, which may be conditioned by the quality of light and with these ephemeral premises she sets to establish a critical relationship to her moments, transforming to make it creative in the sense of inventive shifts with her ‘inner self’ and ‘emotions’ that plays upon her.  These multiple yet complex factors provides her with the dynamic charge; the process of which makes her environment irrelevant and puts her in artistic trance whence nothing matters except her intimacy with materials and tools.  This belies the normative concerns of artistic process of preconceived concepts already imaged in the mind and what follows is perhaps the material emergence of it on paper/canvas.  Since her structure of painting is concerned only with space and colours, this to a large extent explains her concept of colour ‘as not a colour,’ but just a means to bring her into a complete communion with her work and the process thus started may continue for days “which may be as short or long as eight” according to Sheetal, clearly establishing her working methodology in the construction of her works as unrelated to a period of time, clarifying her journey to saying ‘that’s it’; when she ends her form of human activity in terms of what it could create in process and relationships.

A silent journey through her recent works may freeze the viewer to one description namely ‘similar’.  Yet her similarity is built into the very idea of difference and this difference is the basis of her ‘magical moments’ and ‘inspirational relationships’.  This is where Sheetal strikes at the heart of the matter, reconceptualizing her ‘moments’ according to the quality of light and poetic play with materials through an active imagination that enables her to create similarly different works that offers varying significations.  And she establishes the claims that her works can be titled ‘moment to moment’, which clearly allows for the capricious play of subjectivity and objectivity to be interpreted at will.  Though her works are pure abstractions and the idea of reconceptualization may appear anomalous, let it be made clear that it is the varied magical moments that she continues to tender that can be read at will with her redefinitions and reconfigurations.  The basic premise of her art is not so much expressive as it is provocative establishing a reality of the unreality a paradoxical connectivity that nurtures to create the tension within her artistic being. 

Her art works are persuasive and seductive.  They beckon by their gentle whisper. Her vast arena of colours defies specificity in terms of red or mauve, ochre or earthy yellow, night blues or wintry purples, whites or off whites.  Her collaboration with colours contingent to the moment is three or four hues, resulting in the subtexts offering delicacy of subtle tones and textures, that brings forth the character of her seemingly placid works.  Everything is in motion, is reflection of itself and nothing is what appears to be, because it is the convergence of the flow of different shapes and textures.  Her works creates an effect of palimpsest by covering the paper with another or piling layered paint to build up the image of her unconditional self.  But this poised character is deceptive since a dynamic tension exists in the layered colours that create its own life and spirit, unique to her individuated experiences at the moment of encounter with it.  If the viewer is led through such an experience, then it is the strength of intellectual compulsion on the part of the artist to make the viewer take a walk through her mental landscapes.

Select Sources:
Raney, Karen, Art in Question, The Arts Council of England; [London: Continuum, 2003.]
Fernie, E., Art History and its Methods: A critical Anthology, [New York: Phaidon Publication1996.]