Tuesday 24 September 2013

A looking back, an early start up(14)

An old artwork

The vortex of image

This is another work that I painted on paper in tempera after 1991 and this painting did not display in any exhibition.
Nilotpal Sinha   The man and the woman(2)   Tempera on paper    18" x 24" (app.)    1991-1993
     The man and the woman(2)     Tempera on paper     18" x 24" (app.)     1991-1993


A looking back, an early start up(13)

An old artwork

The vortex of image

I did this tempera work on paper after 1991 that was “to create a vortex of images that settle down upon close scrutiny into recognizable shapes..” and critics or viewers hardly believed to take it as an effort in search of a new style where the content I tried to feed forcefully not playfully, although that was neither true nor an effort for searching a new style. That time it was so much crucial for me to preview a recognizable relation between form and content rather than an adopted style and I confirmed that the style that always made itself to become an integrated part of the form if any playful workmanship existed behind that effort.
Nilotpal Sinha   The girl under a tree    Tempera on paper    18" x 24" (app.)    1991-1993
   The girl under a tree   Tempera on paper   18" x 24" (app.)   1991-1993


A looking back, an early start up(12)

An old artwork

(Hu)man & machine relationship...

This is another acrylic work that I did on paper in 1991-92 and this painting did not take part in any exhibition even not shown to anyone of my friends' circle, art lovers or gallery owners after or before 1991. I don't know whether it is right or wrong but a feeling of the mechanical sounds in the workshop that I enjoy here. For that reason also with few added imaginative elements this is one of my favorite painting among others. I like it!
Workshop series(5)    Tempera on paper    30″ x 23″ (app.)    1991
Nilotpal Sinha     Workshop series(5)     Acrylic on paper     30″ x 23″ (app.)     1991-92


A looking back, an early start up(11)

An old artwork

(Hu)man & machine relationship…

Nilotpal Sinha    Workshop series(4)    Tempera on paper    30″ x 23″ (app.)   1990
Nilotpal Sinha    Workshop series(4)    Tempera on paper    30″ x 23″ (app.)    1991


This tempera painting that participated in one of my solo exhibition at Academy of fine arts, Kolkata in 1991 and I did this in the same year. This artwork of the earlier workshop series has features that The Telegraph mentioned in art review in 1991; please follow the previous post.

A looking back, an early start up (10)

An old artwork

(Hu)man & machine relationship...

Nilotpal Sinha    Workshop series(3)    Acrylic on canvas    48″ x 36″   1991
Nilotpal Sinha     Workshop series(3)     Acrylic on canvas     48″ x 36″     1991


This acrylic painting that participated in one of my solo exhibition at Academy of fine arts, Kolkata in 1991 and I did this in the same year. This artwork of the previous workshop series has features that The Telegraph mentioned in art review in 1991 :
"..group of workers is placed against a background crowded with pulsating details of things and objects native to a factory workshop. But they also include figures of fairy tale characters--a lady in a flowing gown and a winged human--adding an imaginative dimension to the treatment of the theme.  All the form and figures, given bristly distorted figuration that stem from an expressionist approach, melt into a total designal unit sprawled across the entire pictorial space. The central figures either distractingly stand out as in the two acrylics or are harmoniously merged with background details as in the more attractive ink and gouache given the same title." ( Mr. Manasij Majumder, the art critic of Telegraph mentioned here another acrylic work that  exhibited with the above painting and ink, gouache works on paper are not posted here.)

N.B. This is to let you know to say sorry that a mistake happened in earlier posts, that's the name of the newspaper which I did typing is wrong. You should read The Telegraph instead of  The Statesman, both news paper published from Kolkata regularly.

A looking back, an early start up(9)

An old artwork

(Hu)man & machine relationship..

This is my another acrylic painting that took part in one of my solo exhibition at Academy of fine arts, Kolkata in 1991 and in the same year I did this painting. This included into the previous workshop series and has features “to create a vortex of images that settle down upon close scrutiny into recognizable shapes..” (art review in “The Statesman, 1991”).
Nilotpal Sinha Workshop series(2) Acrylic on canvas 48″ x 36″ 1991
Nilotpal Sinha     Workshop series(2)     Acrylic on canvas     48″ x 36″     1991


A looking back, an early start up(8)

An old artwork

(Hu)man & machine relationship..

I did this acrylic in 1991 that participated a solo exhibition in the same year. Once I was a resident in a semi-industrial locality in east Calcutta (Kolkata) township area where so many small-scale industries and slums resided at side by side and working people including different class of lower-income group people were the dwellers in that under developed semi-urban locality that locality was so much congested, dirty, unhealthy and a den of anti social or out laws; people survived with a tremendous insecure life struggle to keep up their basic needs that sometimes halted by the political clash like as factory closure or strike, almost a suffering was clung to everyday life.

I saw them very closely and I had a friendly connection with them though they had not enough time to pay attention to someone as because of their insecure harder life style. In spite of that their simplicity, polite behaviour and laughing care, self gravity, rejoice and careful participation in a religious festival to enjoy the festive mood attracted me vigorously. A close observation to their life and a (hu)man-machine-struggle for finishing products skillfully inspired me to paint a narrative content of the flowing rhythmical life style!
Nilotpal Sinha  Workshop series(1)  Acrylic on canvas  48" x 36"  1991
Nilotpal Sinha    Workshop series(1)    Acrylic on canvas    48" x 36"   1991


A looking back, an early start up(7)

An old artwork
 

The woman's liberty

The lady before a goblet  Acrylic on canvas  30" x 24" (app.)  1991
The woman before a goblet     Acrylic on canvas     30" x 24" (app.)     1991

















 I painted this canvas in 1991 that took part in one of my solo show in the same year. This painted "to create a vortex of images that settle down upon close scrutiny into recognizable shapes..", (art review in "The Statesman") focussed a crude reality of the society's intention to suppress the woman's liberty where I saw few women who drastically discard the negative attitude and backwardness of the society that guided by the concept of male domination. Not that they were not aware to take drinks unhealthy but aggressively they wanted to take it as a protest symbol to protect the women's privacy and highlight the power of women's liberty. That was true because no adult female customer could enter into the bar alone without her male friend.

This is a peculiar incidence that this control is a typical mediocre social custom that anybody knows and this social custom does not exist nearly in other classes if they are economically backward, marginal or higher than the middle class. This is a standard motivation against the women's freedom, their choices, their enjoyments, their thoughts, their feelings etc. and a part of pseudo progressive cultural phenomenon which had been grown up and mixed up with two aspects that one came with the values from other migrated cultures where another aspect that had generated from its own soil of the society's feudal structure. This is also more interesting that the enlightenment could not change the motivation of the people although they are properly educated by the modern education system through out the country.

A looking back, an early start up(6)

An old artwork
 

This is one of my lost paintings..

I painted this acrylic on canvas in the year 1991 that took part in a solo exhibition in the same year. Later this painting with many more canvases were sent to a gallery owner for sale on consignment basis and two years later when I wanted to get it back with other paintings it was found that particularly this artwork had been lost and not found. This is the real story of two faces too that was entitled as "The man and woman" in the show.

They said "..Uhh!", "..Ahh!", "..Wow!!" etc.

Near about eighteen years later when I showed its photo to few art lovers they liked it very much and said "..Uhh!", "..Ahh!", "..Wow!!" etc. and I could feel at once that they liked it because of its relevancy to the local art market's demand and the choice of the art buyers that was the conventional habit for judgement by those persons who focused themselves always as art gurus of the art world.

If not true

If not true, I think today why this had lost while this had a major differences to the style of my other paintings that related to the contemporary style in art practice of that time? Indeed, the material value of the canvas was not so high that could be sold as matter or things normally! So it proved something that I said here.
The man and woman
The man and woman     Acrylic on canvas     24" x 18" (app.)     1991


Monday 23 September 2013

A looking back, an early start up(5)

Digitally processed old artwork

Pavement dwellers

I did this painting in acrylic in 1991 and digitally processed in 2013 that was exhibited by me in one of our group show at Academy of fine arts, Kolkata in 1991.
Nilotpal Sinha  Digitally processed old acrylic on canvas  30" x 40" (app.)  1991-2013
Pavements dwellers   Digitally processed  on canvas   30" x 40" (app.)   2013


A looking back, an early start up(4)

An old artwork

Figures in the field

Nilotpal Sinha  Figures in the field  Oil on canvas  24" x 18" (app.)  1989
Nilotpal Sinha    Figures in the field    Oil on canvas    24" x 18" (app.)    1989



















I did this oil painting in 1989 and participated in my first group show at Academy of fine arts, Kolkata in the year same year.

A looking back, an early start up(3)

An old artwork

The Dreamy Drama

Nilotpal Sinha  Dreamy drama  Acrylic on canvas 30" x 20" (app.)  1989
Nilotpal Sinha     Dreamy drama     Acrylic on canvas     30" x 20" (app.)     1989


The dreamy drama from the past dreamy days!

I did this painting in the year 1989 when I participated first in my life in our first group show at Academy of fine arts, Kolkata that organized by the Lupt Cult (Let us paint together and cult from the culture). Lupt Cult was our second painters' group and this group  liquidated in 1990 after organising another one group show in that year. Those days that were mostly significant to me because of a stormy and argumentative mentality to quarrel each other by the all members of the group who had tried with their best effort to experiment on canvas for bringing out something that would become a new figurative approach and of course which had  indicated to the narrative style. At that time it was an ongoing process when few of us was thinking thematically to contain the mother complex, few were trying to go through the romantic ideas or following Avant-Garde movements too. All the major brain storming, crucial political and aesthetical debates that started more than nine years ago from that day had revived again. In the long run, incidentally I was then fallen into a complex condition and I could not find out the way how to and from where to start the solution on internal relation or conflict between form and content, somehow the painting that I continued daily in my studio. This is unknown till today whether that practice was right or wrong but it was truly not a transparent situation in that dreamy days from where the Dreamy Drama painted on canvas and showed in the exhibition by me.

Here is a fact that few years back from that time the acrylic color just appeared in the market and we had aggressively grasped comparatively the low-cost acrylic color as a new medium by replacing costly oil colors and we had no idea how to use acrylic on paper or canvas, neither the basic treatments nor any knowledge on method and materials and that way technically what we guessed, perhaps a foolish attempt, we started to work in acrylic abruptly, sometimes that resulted good to some extent, sometimes it happened a bad incidence. Though it appeared as fantastic color to every one of us as because of transparency and no need of any oil medium but the use of water only; even the easy access to brush up on the surface just like a brushing in water-color that we could feel a mixing of combined technique of oil and water-color treatment, in fact, the easy access to move from dark tone to light tone in oil or light tone to dark tone in water-color tecnique-use. In later period this medium became one and only one not only to us also to the contemporary artists in all over india. One of my reputed artist-friend, to whom acrylic is the most favorite medium, said in a joke that if the acrylic color would not be appeared in the market or not discovered by the company for the art world there were so many artists in India who had no possibilities of becoming an artist because of various causes. These funny words prove it to somewhat today too!

A looking back, an early start up..(2)

Old artworks

The dancing figures in darkness

I did these two acrylic paintings in 1991 that displayed in my first solo exhibition at Academy Of Fine Arts, Kolkata in the same year. The 'Man and Woman with Candle-1' was much appreciated by the critic in paper review and the viewers appreciated the other one. Already I have posted a black and white drawing yesterday which is a layout of this painting (Man and Woman with Candle-2).

When the art critic asked me about the painting I told him that I saw these slum area people in a dancing mood on the footpath in a mid night darkness at Kolkata on any religious occasion (those days we were in a trouble because of regular power cut in our city life); obviously they were following drum beats of a terrific rhythmic popular film song (here it is called 'filmi-gana'), where few lighted candles placed around them and the reflected light had created so many beautiful moving shadows or imageries on the wall behind the dancers. The  movements of those imageries and the candles were the most significant objects at that time that I felt when I tried to draw on canvas.

Today in Kolkata sometimes we see a candle light procession by the citizens to protest against a political or apolitical specifically which is said as social anarchy, violence and torture that have been related to the past that I experienced in similar manner though the purpose and the function were different.

In my painting it was a peculiar modernist approach in the year 1991 but that happened because of an extreme influence by Picasso and M.F. Hussain both. In those days I was searching several type of formal practice in visual language that would be compatible with a linear quality, a flatness or a simplified form of expression and I found it in their works as a source of inspiration or reference. Some of questions raised by the viewers who asked me that why did you achieve the form that inherited from the crude modernist practice such as Cubism or Expressionism, rather than the searching in your own soil for the localized content? Then it was a difficult question to me to give answers but I could feel that they wanted to mean the so-called illusionistic academic realism that I rejected violently at the end of my study and I felt it that the way they proposed was a backwardness that tried to pull down from the contemporary practice for the new art language and today I am sure that the decision that I took was correct. This is an endless journey during the life and the changes that are always welcome with the everlasting transgression of life untill otherwise the physical death will come.

Man and Woman with Candle-1

Man and Woman with Candle-1
Nilotpal Sinha    Man and Woman with Candle-1    Acrylic on Canvas    48" x 36"    1991


 

 

 

 

 

 

Man and Woman with Candle-2

NilotMan and Woman with Candle-1
Nilotpal Sinha    Man and Woman with Candle-2    Acrylic on Canvas    48" x 36"    1991

A looking back, an early start up..

An old artwork

Man & woman-2

After the finishing of my student life when I just started to do work in different media such as oil, gouache, tempera or charcoal or ink and wash etc., the availability of acrylic color had turned me to the practice of acrylic on smaller or larger size of paper or canvas and this is one of the small works that had got a chance to take part in the national exhibition of LKA in 1991.
Man and woman-2
Man and woman-2      Acrylic on paper      14" x 10"     1989


Drawing-2

An old artwork

Black & white drawing

Drawing-2
Nilotpal Sinha    Drawing-2    Ink    8" x 5" (avg.)    1997


Drawing-9

An old artwork

Black and white drawing

Drawing-9
Nilotpal Sinha    Drawing-9    Ink and wash    11" x  7" (app.)    1991


Drawing-8

An old artwork

Black and white drawing

Drawing
Nilotpal Sinha    Drawing    Ink on paper    5" x 10" (app.)    1997


Drawing-7

An old artwork

Black and white drawing

Drawing
Nilotpal Sinha     Drawing     Ink on paper    11" x 8"(app.)    1990


Drawing-6

An old artwork

Black and white drawing

Drawing
Nilotpal Sinha    Drawing    Ink on paper    11" x 8"(app.)    1997
 

 

Sunday 22 September 2013

Drawing-5

An old drawing

Black and white drawing

The mother
Nilotpal Sinha     The mother     Ink on paper    8" x 5" (app.)    1994
 

Drawing-3

An old artwork

Black and white drawing

Drawing-3
Nilotpal Sinha    Drawing-3    Ink on paper    8" x 15" (app.)    1996

Drawing-4

An old artwork

Black and white drawing

Drawing-4
Nilotpal Sinha     Drawing-4     Ink on paper     20" x 15"   1991
 

Drawing

Black & white drawing

An old artwork
 
From early life in my art college I was very much attracted by the black & white drawing with pen, pencil, ink, wood charcoal, lead stick, pastel dry and oil, chalk even the printing ink that I used to do the drawing on paper following a mono-print type technique. First two years of 5-year diploma course in drawing and painting fixed as a preparatory course which included drawing as a basic and mandatory subject. All first-year and 2nd-year art students had to practice huge number of drawings during the year to submit before the faculty members for correction or assessment in the annual examination.

In relation to this context I just remember a story now. When I was a school boy I had no art materials even a paint box or exercise book for drawing, but I wished to draw, so I managed it with fountain pen , ink and math exercise book, I tried to draw on a blank page by copying or tracing any good book illustration that was a delightful activity to me for the day.

In any case, in later period when I become an art student it was a common trend to draw with pen or brush, but I liked to draw with slick wooden stick or slick bamboo stick chiseled at one end just like a fountain pen dipped into an ink pot. This type of pen called as Khaager Kalom in Bengal that placed in the worship of Devi Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge also a beautiful ink pot (made with terracotta, holding a unique form & shape about which I think, it adopts from western culture probably) filled in cow milk and placed before the goddess. Today so many type of calligraphy pens are available but this kalom or pen do the same thing that's mostly interesting!

So what I have started to say about drawing that is my practice to do on paper likely be interesting is a process of ink and wash technique, sometime I use dry or oil pastel, chalk or lead stick to make up visibility of the surface which is parallel to other media, even now I use thin and coated canvas surface for big size. It results very good if little acrylic color used for coloration. No matter if it's called as mixed media.

Another technique that I mentioned before is a process of making mono-prints in the print making graphic studio where I placed a big size glass on the table by rolling black ink with a hand roller on the glass surface and then placed a paper over the sticky inked surface and draw with pencil without touching the paper. After finishing the job I picked the paper up gently and placed it somewhere to dry completely. The drawing that I did on the backside of the paper automatically created on the reverse side and obviously the drawn object become reverse. I made so many drawings at that time and one of them awarded by the college authority in annual exhibition of the college fest.
 
Drwaing
Nilotpal Sinha       Drawing        Ink      10" x 8" (avg.)      1997



Poster for exhibition

 This is a poster of the show Churning at AFA, Kolkata, in 2009.
 
This is a poster of the show Churning at AFA, Kolkata, in 2009.