Painting unseen shadows into focus
Three semiabstract paintings depict life in slums of India
We bypass it and often tend to overlook it amidst our hectic schedules but can we ever ignore it? Nah, never! Call it a slum, ghetto or a commune, these rows of hutments in congested cities, down the suburban outskirts or along the railway tracks are part and parcel of an urban fold which cannot be seen in detachment.
In between our daily rush hours while commuting, reporting to official commitments, transacting business activities, reaching our schools, colleges or trapped in traffic jams and performing other activities, we do come across a bustling life and its nuances on pavements, near a traffic signal, under a street-side tap, on puddled roads, in crowded districts, adjacent to a swanky shopping mall, multiplex or a high-rise as a distinctive contrast.
Assembling three semiabstract frames on slumlife as a single work of art on display at the ongoing Cima Awards Show in Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts, talented artist Anjan Modak thus paints a pensive picture of his chosen subject titled Life in Slum with the medium of watercolours and graphite on canson paper. Open from February 5 till March 2 between 3 pm to 8 pm, the specimens coming in a size of 42”X81” strike a chord with the viewers who flock to get a glimpse.
One may show a note of sympathy for the struggles and hardships faced by the slum-dwellers on a regular basis. From lack of electricity, to the crisis of lifesaving water, to absence of non-pollutant supplies like the cooking gas, slum inhabitants have to cope up with every scarcity of daily usage that we could seldom imagine.
Like this one image is a case in point. The parched, thirsty pair of lips over a bucket denotes its hot and dry open mouth, craving for a drop of water with the touch of which, a cloud of vapour may issue out. The billowing smoke emits a stream of small slumhouses in its course gathering upwards.
“I have seen the travails of slum residents from a very close proximity while travelling in local trains or as a street pedestrian; how they queue up with buckets to fill in water from a single tap in their vicinity or forming a beeline at the local ration shop to procure kerosene oil or buy veggies and groceries from the local markets. All this and much more — their happiness and sorrow, rise and fall, weep and laughter, commotion and festive revelry — attract me to delineate a composition on their unique way of life,” shares the painter. “The gaping mouth suggests their cries of deprivation, their marginalised situation and the angst of being a have-not. There is a hint of life in it, a symbol of palpitation pulsating inside,” he further amplifies his idea.
The second picture shows a lighted hurricane placed over a red brick as if a pedestal, with its wavering flame shaped like a human eye. This only source of illumination, a modest one indeed, brightens the gloomy, dusky interiors of a slum settlement and its suffocating, matchbox existence.
The third vignette is the quintessential earthen oven, familiarly found in every lower middle-class, mid-income group households, in shanties and at makeshift roadside food stall kitchens. Incidentally, eminent Bengal masters like Ganesh Pyne and others would frequently focus on objects like hurricanes, lamp posts and candles as their subjects of interest back in the 1970s, informs the artist.
In the offing is a series of ink drawings done on handmade Nepali paper, which will be exhibited at the city’s Emami Chisel Art gallery. Captioned as Life on Footpath, the fourpiece collection will be mounted up at the venue for a month-long show from March 4 onwards. It unfolds snapshots of a precarious footpath life. The other work of art to be put up for exposition named Increase and Decrease is a one-piece non-figurative offer from the painter’s studio in watercolours, graphite and paper cutting pasted on canson paper. The picture unfurls a towering pillar covered in a blanket of dust particles at an under-construction site.