ART SPEAK
An exquisite fusion between nature and art that gives you major goals to revamp your house
Fusion between nature and art
In last month’s issue, I wrote on how art in the form of sculptures and new age installations can be set up in nature and seamlessly integrate with the natural outdoor environment. I knew I’d be getting a lot of mails for a DIY of the exact opposite and I did! This article therefore, was planned pretty much as a sequel. You don’t have to be a dendrophile to want to do that (incidentally meaning a lover of trees and honestly, I wasn’t aware of this term until a very dear friend proclaimed he was one- and it sounded just fashionable if you ask me!). After all, you’re not taking trees, just a feeling of nature, indoors!
For centuries, artists across the world have been fascinated by nature’s sublime beauty. Romanticism, an entire movement in the arts in the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe, emphasized intense emotion experienced especially when confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature among other things. The Japanese, in fact have a word for it - yugen, it is a word that describes the feeling when nature is indescribable. It refers to the awareness that the universe is so profound that the emotions we feel when we try to contemplate it are too deep and mysterious to convey. In Indian aesthetics of course, nature is personified as Prakriti or the
female energy or Shakti as a consort of Shiva. It is the union of Prakriti and Purusha that is the cause of life and the world. In our fast deteriorating natural environs, a love for nature in all its forms is, needless to say urgently needed.
Nature is the ever changing, observable physical world. Yet, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, we know nothing certain about it except that it exists. Our detailed knowledge about its appearance and phenomena is based on the sensations we have of it. As we perceive it with our senses, what we make of it is altered by this very act of seeing. The artistic intention to create art even in the likeness of the external world is thus, a process of deliberation. Whatever the object is or was, we do not know, as this very act has transformed it into an idea. So, what we really have is an idea of what it could be.
Along this idea of subjectivism, I recently opened a new show at Art Centrix Space titled, Nature | Deliberated. It delves into the making of art as a culmination of ideation, a distilling if you will, of rumination on the observed world. It is as much an exploration of a plethora of ideas through a large collection of works as it is a show of the abundance of nature. Exhibited are the works of Indian artists based within the country or abroad and of a few foreign artists settled in India. I coincided this show with the time of renewal of nature. Typically, monsoon season is considered the high point of nature in all its glory in India but I think early to mid-summer is truly the time of regeneration when after some six weeks of shedding of leaves, (I know because my maalis do nothing but sweep the gardens at that time!) when the peepal, neem and so many others come alive with reddish to fluorescent green baby leaves.
So, this time I am not showing you how you can take your love for nature indoors – I’m just showing you art through images of the works here that takes nature seriously so that you could take that indoors.