What is good art? The question, perhaps, could also
be, what is relevant art? For those of us engaged with greater comfort and
interest in literature, cinema and the performing arts, the question is
troubling, bewildered as we often tend to be, gaping at paintings, sculptures
and installations at galleries.
What am I feeling? What is it saying? How am I supposed to respond to it? We are hesitant to make even the feeble and banal concessions of 'nice' or 'I enjoyed it', all so easy with a book, film, play or song.
But there is something about Veerendra Kumar’s painting exhibition, Images from an Indian Surrealist, that is striking and urgent, that summons a response at first sight. Curated by Akumal Ramachander (see box), the exhibition reveals a truly original talent, at once located in his time and place, creating strange images of familiar experience and landscape.
If you look at his paintings long enough, you might even experience his time, space and story. Veerendra Kumar, 29, is from Challakere, a small town of about 50,000 people in Chitradurga district of Karnataka.
Wikipedia notes that it is set to be a'future science city' since the Indian Institute of Science has an 8,000-acre campus at Kudapura near the town and is soon to be surrounded by several other defence research and development institutions.
But even as premier science institutes erect walls at the site, the villagers in the area are agitating,Natural Chinese turquoisebeads at Wholesale prices. fearing displacement and loss of livelihood.
The people here depend on sheep rearing and oil mills; kambali (woven blankets) provide a large part of the village income and the Challakere town is one of largest production centres of edible oil in India.
But Veerendra Kumar comes from Chouluru village, from the arid plains that provide the few tracts of pastureland for sheep and goats on which his community survives. His imagination in the paintings is full of uncanny combinations of man and beast, man himself a beast,Find detailed product information for Hot Sale howospareparts Radiator. beast becoming – even the ubiquitous insects – part of his time and being.
His subjects are confidently drawn, set starkly against a dreamscape visited by overhanging hope – a green leaf, a tendril, a hopeful creature – and the dry ground with rocks or similar rises on the horizon.
When Akumal Ramachander visited him at Kambali Bhavan on Infantry Road in Bangalore, where his community people had offered the young artist space to live and work, he saw four paintings and was transfixed: “I’m telling you, honestly, I was,” he says.
Akumal got some overseas visitors, too,We're evaluating the possibility of adding more injectionmoulding machines, to have a look. A highly- respected Polish art critic told him: “You know, Akumal, I didn’t expect to find this in India.”
Harold Shapinsky, the late celebrated Brooklyn abstract expressionist, was a little known New York painter when Akumal Ramachander, an English lecturer from the city’s University of Agricultural Sciences, happened to see slides of his work during a visit to Chicago in 1984.
Akumal was convinced he had discovered a genius. And that was enough. In 1985, then staff writer of New Yorker, Lawrence Wechsler wrote in his Shapinsky’s Karma about this 11:30 PM phone call from a perfect stranger: “A stranger on the line introduced himself as Akumal Ramachander, from Bangalore, India. He was calling from Washington, DC.”
When Wechlsler met Akumal for the skilfully-wrested appointment at his office a few days later, he described what he saw: “...a youngish, fairly slight gentleman with short-cropped black hair and a round face. His conversation caromed all over the place (Gdansk, Reagan, Sri Lanka, Lech Walesa, Indira Gandhi, the Sikhs, Margaret Thatcher, Satyajit Ray, London).”
Then Akumal had gushed to the startled Wechsler: “Harold Shapinsky! Abstract expressionist painter, generation of de Kooning and Rothko, an undiscovered marvel,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? an absolute genius, completely unknown, utterly unappreciated... He lives here in New York City, with his wife, in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, where he continues to paint,Find detailed product information for howotruck piston ring, as he has been doing for over forty years, like an angel...You must visit this Shapinsky fellow.
He's a true find, a major discovery. It is my destiny to bring him to the attention of the world.” For those of us who knew him in the 1980s, Akumal was as passionate about music, politics and art as he is now, arguing with just about anybody and about anything.
What am I feeling? What is it saying? How am I supposed to respond to it? We are hesitant to make even the feeble and banal concessions of 'nice' or 'I enjoyed it', all so easy with a book, film, play or song.
But there is something about Veerendra Kumar’s painting exhibition, Images from an Indian Surrealist, that is striking and urgent, that summons a response at first sight. Curated by Akumal Ramachander (see box), the exhibition reveals a truly original talent, at once located in his time and place, creating strange images of familiar experience and landscape.
If you look at his paintings long enough, you might even experience his time, space and story. Veerendra Kumar, 29, is from Challakere, a small town of about 50,000 people in Chitradurga district of Karnataka.
Wikipedia notes that it is set to be a'future science city' since the Indian Institute of Science has an 8,000-acre campus at Kudapura near the town and is soon to be surrounded by several other defence research and development institutions.
But even as premier science institutes erect walls at the site, the villagers in the area are agitating,Natural Chinese turquoisebeads at Wholesale prices. fearing displacement and loss of livelihood.
The people here depend on sheep rearing and oil mills; kambali (woven blankets) provide a large part of the village income and the Challakere town is one of largest production centres of edible oil in India.
But Veerendra Kumar comes from Chouluru village, from the arid plains that provide the few tracts of pastureland for sheep and goats on which his community survives. His imagination in the paintings is full of uncanny combinations of man and beast, man himself a beast,Find detailed product information for Hot Sale howospareparts Radiator. beast becoming – even the ubiquitous insects – part of his time and being.
His subjects are confidently drawn, set starkly against a dreamscape visited by overhanging hope – a green leaf, a tendril, a hopeful creature – and the dry ground with rocks or similar rises on the horizon.
When Akumal Ramachander visited him at Kambali Bhavan on Infantry Road in Bangalore, where his community people had offered the young artist space to live and work, he saw four paintings and was transfixed: “I’m telling you, honestly, I was,” he says.
Akumal got some overseas visitors, too,We're evaluating the possibility of adding more injectionmoulding machines, to have a look. A highly- respected Polish art critic told him: “You know, Akumal, I didn’t expect to find this in India.”
Harold Shapinsky, the late celebrated Brooklyn abstract expressionist, was a little known New York painter when Akumal Ramachander, an English lecturer from the city’s University of Agricultural Sciences, happened to see slides of his work during a visit to Chicago in 1984.
Akumal was convinced he had discovered a genius. And that was enough. In 1985, then staff writer of New Yorker, Lawrence Wechsler wrote in his Shapinsky’s Karma about this 11:30 PM phone call from a perfect stranger: “A stranger on the line introduced himself as Akumal Ramachander, from Bangalore, India. He was calling from Washington, DC.”
When Wechlsler met Akumal for the skilfully-wrested appointment at his office a few days later, he described what he saw: “...a youngish, fairly slight gentleman with short-cropped black hair and a round face. His conversation caromed all over the place (Gdansk, Reagan, Sri Lanka, Lech Walesa, Indira Gandhi, the Sikhs, Margaret Thatcher, Satyajit Ray, London).”
Then Akumal had gushed to the startled Wechsler: “Harold Shapinsky! Abstract expressionist painter, generation of de Kooning and Rothko, an undiscovered marvel,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? an absolute genius, completely unknown, utterly unappreciated... He lives here in New York City, with his wife, in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, where he continues to paint,Find detailed product information for howotruck piston ring, as he has been doing for over forty years, like an angel...You must visit this Shapinsky fellow.
He's a true find, a major discovery. It is my destiny to bring him to the attention of the world.” For those of us who knew him in the 1980s, Akumal was as passionate about music, politics and art as he is now, arguing with just about anybody and about anything.
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