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Capturing Music in Colours

Noted painter S.Harsha Vardhana’s recent solo show at the Gallery Espace, New Delhi was appreciated by the art lovers in the city. In the catalogue forward Suren Navlakha narrates the story of the development of Harsha Vardhana as a multifaceted artist.

I

He might have been a musician, or a mathematician even. As it is, we know him as a painter. Harsha Vardhana’s connection with art, music and mathematics comes from a deep seated impulse that takes his consciousness sailing past the perceptual pastures to the shores of an unknown, seamless world where beauty is suffused with mystery, and discovery with wonder. Compulsion drives him to resurrect the magic of these moments, and the result is the paintings we have before us; paintings characteristically captivating, contemplative and austere.

II

For one so instinctively driven to painting, however, Harsha Vardhana’s journey to painting has not been straight or smooth. He was born breathing art, yes. His father, the late J. Swaminathan, was himself a painter of great eminence and originality: he was also a forceful art critic, a lively poet, a remarkable thinker, a committed activist, and, above all, one with a wide circle of friends, artists and others. Harsha Vardhana, and his elder brother Kalidas, grew up in an atmosphere of intense vitality suffused with artistic creativity and deep reflections over issues of art. Home life resembled a seminary for learning about art inside out.

But regardless of the favourable externalities and his own aptitude, taking to painting as a career was not to be for young Harsha Vardhana. His fiercely independent spirit and willfulness, so pronouncedly reflected too in his paintings, proved an insurmountable stumbling block in the passage to his destiny as a painter. Heightened individualism fuelled a self-image of an emancipated being, committed to making independent choices, not replicating his father’s. In the end, this rendered him unequal to acknowledging his own natural promise. Instead, he busied himself with his formal studies, in particular mathematics, attracted as he was by the simplicity lying beneath its complexity. Later, signing up for the Master’s course in Biotechnology at the Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani, he also registered for a special course in mathematics. And at the Department of Music in the Institute, he began taking lessons in sitar, a choice not entirely fortuitous: while in Delhi, he had already been drawn to playing sarod which his brother had started learning.

It was then, in the early years at Pilani that he also came under the spell of Carnataka classical music, more seriously than ever before, thanks to a fellow student whose love for it was as deep as was his understanding of its nuances profound. It filled a long lurking but undetected void in Harsha Vardhana, bringing him moments of such ecstasy and escape as he had never before experienced. For him, this was the first galvanizing experience in the course of a journey that was to take him to – an eventually culminate in – painting as the path to self-fulfillment.

As years drifted by, Harsha Vardhana ended up joining some leading pharmaceutical and Bio-technological multinationals. As a well paid, successful business executive he was on social ascent. But this was not fated to last. A long period of self-negation gnawed him from within, bringing disquiet and unrest. The restlessness grew as time passed, until in a cathartic moment his resistances broke down. He quit his job and moved into relative seclusion. And he began painting, in a frenzy, mostly pastel on paper, day after day, month after month, unmindful of where it would lead him, and to what effect. The painter Harsha Vardhana was born, without any fixed goals, or any expectations.

III

Although not altogether unfamiliar with the practicalities of painting, occasionally in his boyhood even having helped his father at work, Harsha Vardhana has developed into an essentially self-taught artist. And he found too a solution of his own to externalize what lay incarcerated in the deep recesses of his consciousness, relying purely on his own instincts and intuitive judgment.

His works came in the public domain for the first time in a solo show in 1997, save for an entry at the Sixth Biennale, Bharat Bhawan, Bhopal, shortly before. Between then and now, his paintings have undergone marked stylistic changes. Those from the early experimental period present a wider array of variety in respect of the thematic material, tonal treatment, pictorial content, forms and shapes than one notices now; a reflection no doubt of how in the course of his search for a way corresponding to his needs, he explored many more, sometimes hitting an alley or two traversed by others before him, mentionably Paul Klee and his father.

On the whole, external artistic influences on Harsha Vardhana’s development as an artist have been few and selective, and not so much in the manner in which paintings are executed, as in respect of ideas governing the substance and reach of art. However, internalizing these ideas has been easy for him, as they have coincided with, and hence reinforced, his own sensibilities.

A single most major and lasting impact on him has no doubt been that of his father’s ideas for whom the central concern of the artist was not to describe nature, man or society, but to liberate art from and the burden of history, and thereby to contribute to the restoration of mankind’s shattered links with its more archaic but submerged consciousness. Paul Klee’s works too made a deep impression on him, in particular Klee’s involved and intuitive method of articulation, and his need to pictorialise the inner world. 

In the course of time, his style and method of treatment have matured and acquired a distinctive quality of their own, as is amply evidenced in the paintings on display in the present show.

IV

From a purely visual standpoint, Harsha Vardhana’s treatment of colour and his linear work are very striking elements of his style and approach. His avoidance of sharp edges separating different hues, and instead his unfailing faith in the application of tonalities to make transition from one to the other appear gradual, unbroken and smooth is wholly in consonance with his purpose. What it achieves is a sonorous and silky soft surface quality – in many cases also a misty vapourousness pervading the surface – which evokes a sense of mystical calmness that is suggestive of ceaseless motion in the midst of stillness. And his lyrical and charismatic lines and linear patterns – whether continuous or broken, bold or delicate, vivid or shadowy, in black or white – add depth and direction to the coloured surface, arousing a variety of scenographic connections depending on one’s proclivities and stored memories. A reason too why Harsha Vardhana refuses to introduce titles to his paintings.

However, a distinguishing quality of his works, not directly available from a purely visual look, lies in the way space is organized – as syntactic extensions of countless points, without any predetermined single point where finite space fades into infinity. This is unmistakably a conception of all points as of equal importance, and of space as their undivided extension. This has given him a characteristic freedom of movement which can reciprocate and resonate with the spontaneity of the moment, be it from the mood of a musical score, the mystique of a mathematical riddle, the ambience of a mesmerizing landscape, or the surge of an aroused memory. The convergence of moment and movement creates a bewildering variety of perspectives; while the unbroken pulsation running through the undivided space resolves the inherent tension between solidity and rarity, between abundance and sparseness, between volume and void. Indeed this minimalising principle provides a clue too to his invariable use of mixed mediums – from pastels to oils to acrylics to luminescent metallics – whereby he can heighten the continuum of movement without having to take recourse to dividing the plane.

The paintings thus depict a world which is without constraints or closure. The image neither springs from a predetermined design, nor ends up reifying any mode of thinking. There is no propositional logic here, no allegorical disclosures, no reformative urge, but a purely spontaneous, intuitive impulse to capture some subliminal visions which wallow in their own autonomy, and touch the most primeval elements of our aesthetic consciousness, as things in themselves, and by themselves.

The images spread out effortlessly and intuitively on the white opacity of the canvas, every layer of colour uncovering a stretch of the endless mystery. Layer upon layer, stroke after stroke, one texture competing with another, muted tones intermingling with radiant, shining colours, the quiescent nestling with the vibrant, the canvas comes alive with manifold images jostling and cascading down our sense perceptions, linking us with the splendour that lies beneath the surface of everyday appearances.

It is not the perceptual world or the familiar forms to which Harsha Vardhana’s paintings make any reference. They take no recourse to objective coordinates. Baffling as it might appear on first sight, therefore, the presence of triangles, interwoven or variously placed, of mazes of filamental spirals, the broken lines, the odd bands and bars in the midst of an underlying rich tapestry of colours and textures serves not to symbolize any hidden meaning or to embellish any text, but to provide in situ devices which act as a communicative grid to carry the mind directly to a reality purely experiential and subjective. It is an experience which is untouched by the objective world surrounding us, or by the flux of events engulfing our senses: it penetrates these layers of temporality to re-establish our communion with the more elemental mosaic of our aesthetic consciousness.