Speakspace: News link

A news item from today's papers reports that a rare collection of unpublished poems by Rabindranath Tagore were found at Visva Bharati in Santiniketan. It is said that the poems were inspired by his own paintings. Here is the link.

Speakspace: When blossoms are stained...

Yoon Dooree, born in Pusan, South Korea in 1928.  Yoon, a fifteen years old girl was picked up from near her home by Japanese soldiers.  She became a sex slave for Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. Yoon had been living in Woolsan, near her hometown since she was released from the Japanese military camp. She never had gone back to her hometown. 

She had isolated herself from her family, friends, relatives and everybody whomever she knew. There was nobody to carry out the funeral when she died a few months ago.  

I still remember, so clearly, what she had said in an interview: “I am not willing to accept compensation because money has no meaning at this stage of my life. But I will fight for an apology from the Japanese government”.

  

Painted by one of the victims

The cherry blossom symbolises Japan. 

It is also eloquent about the myth that the tree sucks blood from deaths and blossoms in red.

Kim Kyoungae

Speakspace: Gems from Eastern Lands

One of the challenges I face with painting is where to elaborate and where to conceal. Conversations  of late with friends have often ended up with discussing ancient chinese art.  The artists from those times had supreme command over the choices they made while either concealing certain elements or revealing  others. When they revealed, they opened up the world; and when they concealed, they invited the viewer to open up the world! 

As a graduate student, I remember spending a great deal of time looking at chinese paintings and japanese woodcuts. The high-point was an exhibition of original woodcut prints portraying Kabuki actors that was brought to the galleries of Chitrakala Parishath in Bangalore. Here's an image that triggered my memory bank.

Malavika Rajnarayan

Speakspace: Quote

'The artist frees himself from the object because it prevents him from expressing himself exclusively through purely pictorial means". - Kandinsky

Speak Space: Patta Chitra Animation

Non-urban art never fails to fascinate me with its vitality and contemporaneity. The painting that I am currently working on has an image that is a derivation from a Patta Chitra that I'd once seen. In the process of looking for it, I came across this video of a 21st century spin on the character of Arjuna from the Mahabharata.  The video can also be viewed youtube.

Malavika Rajnarayan

Watercolours by Malavika Rajnarayan

Infiltrations   Watercolours on paper   9.5 in. X 12.5 in.   2009

Speak Space: A story of two painters

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red ; Chapter 51

They tell a story in Bukhara that dates back to the time of Abdullah Khan. This Uzbek Khan was a suspicious ruler, and though he didn’t object to more than one artist’s brush contributing to the same illustration, he was opposed to painters copying from one another’s pages—because this made it impossible to determine which of the artists brazenly copying from one another was to blame for an error. More importantly, after a time, instead of pushing themselves to seek out God's memories within the darkness, pilfering miniaturists would lazily seek out whatever they saw over the shoulder of the artist beside them. For this reason, the Uzbek Khan joyously welcomed two great masters, one from Shiraz in the South, the other from Samarkand in the East, who'd fled from war and cruel shahs to the shelter of his court; however he forbade the two celebrated talents to look at each other's work, and separated them by giving them small workrooms on opposite ends of his palace, as far from each other as possible. Thus, for exactly thirty-seven years and four months, as if listening to a legend, these two great masters each listened to Abdullah Khan recount the magnificence of the other's never-to-be-seen work, how it differed from or was oddly similar to the other's. Meanwhile, they both lived dying of curiosity about each other's paintings. After the Uzbek Khan's life had run its long tortoiselike course, the two old artists ran to each other's rooms to see the paintings. Later still, sitting upon either edge of a large cushion, holding each other's books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they recognised from Abdullah Khan's fables, both the miniaturists were overcome with great disappointment because the illustrations they saw weren't nearly as spectacular as those they'd anticipated from the stories they'd heard, but instead appeared, much like all the pictures they'd seen in recent years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn't realize that the reason for this haziness was the blindness that had begun to descend upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone completely blind, rather they attributed their haziness to having been duped by the Khan, and hence they died believing dreams were more beautiful than pictures.

Malavika Rajnarayan