S Murali--Select Paintings and Drawings 1

Soulscapes of a Naturalist and Poet

S. MURALI

SOULSCAPES OF A NATURALIST AND POET

S.Murali has held solo exhibitions of his work in many parts of India and abroad. Although he is a noted academic specialized in theory and aesthetics, Murali has continued to be equally committed to and involved in his pursuit of art.  His work is non-traditional and experimental.  And because he is a self-taught artist he remains free from any school or region.  His work is characterized by ceaseless experiment in the choice of medium as well as in the creation of texture and structure. Murali apparently does not believe in depicting recognizable reality and resorting to conventional methods—yet there is a certain method in his experiment and a certain meaning that surfaces through his exploration of lines and forms. These are conveyed through his specific idiom and style. Abstract, no doubt, but at every point invoking nature and the natural.

For me each work of art is a discovery, and I believe that there is at the heart of every discovery a certain grace, something as yet undiscovered but nevertheless felt through the veins and felt through  the heart—and this becomes the discovery.  Creation and discovery at the same time, at once. But not everything is entirely without a certain reaching after, a sort of search.

I do not paint with some image in mind, but only with a certain absence that reaches after its own essential form.  I visualize strongly, and feel the space.  The lines my hand shapes and the space my brush fills do the rest.  I do not paint ideas.  I leave it for the pundits of art to play with.  My images are non-verbal and in this they exist outside history and writing.  They are what they are and be; somewhere between here and then.

I believe that all art is abstract. Aren’t we reducing the forms and senses from their existential basis when we rearticulate them in any other recreated mode?  Even thinking and seeing are abstract.

I used to paint landscapes and still do.  My stones of Silence are landscapes of the mind.  There is nothing beyond and behind nature.  This I believe.  And this forms the roots of my inspiration.  I love the earth.  I love the skies.  I love the birds and I love all animals. I love man and woman and child. For me the essence of being is in realizing the passing of being. Everything passes.  Let the colours and forms speak in their language of absence.  My space, my time, my life… Earth Signs.

Because we have only one earth.  Because I have only my signs. 

[ From EARTH SIGNS, 2000,Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath,Bangalore,February 2000]

These are troubled times.  No land is at peace.  No people without problems. Brother killing brother.  Bomb blasts, shell explosions, death… “the blood-dimmed tide is loose,” and things fall apart!  Terror walks the streets.  Now, where does the artist fit into all these? Who is the artist? What is art? Why art?  Very difficult questions, these.  The artist is one who creates art, and art is one that is created by the artist! And if the artist creates beauty where is it now? Can we find it in the streets, in these bitter battle-grounds, in the glare of bomb blasts, under the rubble of a lost humanity?  Can it save people? But should art be concerned with all these? Where does it all fit?

Some naughty child has upturned the whole jigsaw puzzle and now who is going to put it all back? Well, not the artist, for sure.  For art is about how to see things, people, sensations, being and becoming.  Art is about growing up and growing apart. Art is about life, living, love and death.

Art does not tell you what to do—least of all to kill.  Art is neither statement nor propaganda. It tells you to be.  To see. It is. Art has nothing to do with people who do not see, who hate, break, destroy and kill. Art is…

My paintings are like signboards.  They lead the eye to and away.  They are never static, though.  You see and you move.  I have been drawing and painting ever since I knew myself.  Perhaps it was wise indeed not to have sought academic instruction and sanction.  It has freed me from the straitjackets of training and tradition. To see, discover and design my own path.  And paths we know,  are made by walking.

My art is sudden and transforming.  It is personal and private.  But it never seeks to close—no bounds, no boundaries.  My concerns are never intellectual and ideological in art. They are reflexions of what happens inside my being. It frees my senses.  I see the tree, sense the grove, smell the wood, feel the forest.  I see the path of destruction.  Like the child in the story who sees the emperor’s new clothes for what they are, I shout, I scream: “look, the earth vanishes!”

[From Look, the Earth Vanishes Kerala Lalit Kala Akademi—Durbar Hall, Kochi, 22nd-28th November 2001]

FAULT LINES 2006

*Fault Lines is Murali’s invitation to see and connect-- nature and inner vision.

I belong to that generation of artists who approach art religiously. There are self imposed laksmana-rekhas beyond which one may not tread— not for me that half baked truth, not for me that incomplete form—what I thirsted for was a completeness of being, transcendental and a holistic oneness with all being—like the river that overflows its third bank-- Experiment is fine, but the naïve art of another time, another place, often signaled the immaturity of perception and sensibility. Hence I chose my time, my place, the space that I feel and sense…

I cannot pretend, neither can I foretell what I would have forfeited.  Art demanded absolute dedication and surrender— then as of now. A feeling for form and a sense of rhythm evolved naturally from the two dimensional space—and the space within spilt on to the earth, the sky, the unlimited space, the satyam—rtam—brhat.  I feel and sense my space.

Abstraction, realism, recognizable form, sensible space – nothing could adequately describe that transition from inner vision into visible form.  Lines and forms, masses and shapes, colours and vacant spaces, textures and structures—these constitute the warp and the woof of created figures and forms—these are the fault lines. For there is no perfect creation, everything shares the emptiness of all being. My being.

For all space has its faults, even the earth bears fault lines—rocks are split, plates shredded, sand and soil spill in to the heart of the earth—the grass is singing, endlessly… My song. My lines.

Hence… FAULT LINES…2005

 [From FAULTLINES 2006Chennai, February 2006-Alliance Francaise de Madras, 6th -18th February 2006]

My Lines, My Space

VIVARTA- 2009

Alliance Francaise de Pondicherry, 18^th March -28^th March 2009March 2009. VIVARTA 2009

ART on canvas and paper has a different mode, method, and history, distinct from the scribbles of the caveman and the ritualized demonstrations of the hunter-gatherer. Of course class, race, history, gender, and nature still contribute to the spatio-temporal order and meaning whatever be the structure and texture of the created surface.

The art of painting, like music and literature at the deeper level still reveals its tribal connections nevertheless, but as language in literature and the mode and method of dissemination in music have changed, so also the language of that art has undergone considerable revolutions within and without. Each artist now works in isolation, and creates newer idioms of expression.

My work traces its distinct path from the south of India. I discovered my space and line a long time ago and am still in the process of realizing the idiom of my own. No art is complete, as I have understood it from within, and yet all art is interrelated as I recognize from its exterior involvements in terms of history and culture. More than music or literature, art effortlessly cuts across space and time of culture and conventions—it is truly universal and individual at the same time.

Hence I am here and also there, now and also then express different moods and disorder different narratives; in short I explore line and curve, flat space and corners, the human and the non-human, all the while breathing in my existential reality as I make it out to be.  Life reveals the inner side of abstraction and the human mind contrives to render order and linearity, narrative and sequence, reality and equation. I work in abstractions: express and experience. In many ways Abstract Art was not the discovery of European artists; it was practiced in its full measure by the early human kind a long time ago. I do not attempt to narrativise consciously -- from the very beginning my landscapes and figurative depictions have followed their free rein. I feel the empty space and many a time have even minimalised my craft in its division. All art attempts toward a unity of self and the other—it takes off from the earth and traverses unbounded space.  It is solace and salvation, creation and discovery, being and becoming. I am yet to experience the sumptuousness of any collective art movements; nothing appears to satisfy, no group, no collective except perhaps the fullness of ones own self and its satiation.  In the seventies my first exposures were to Ravi Varma’s talented depictions of devi devatas, and later to KCS Paniker’s experiments with line and forms, space, words and symbols. While the former was inscribed into the psyche of the land I grew up in, the latter’s works were the creative culminations of the great art movements of the sixties based in urban centres of Bombay, Baroda, Calcutta, and Chennai. After all, the Cubists and Surrealists had by then explored a great deal in Europe and America, and apparently very little remained to be achieved after Picasso and Duchamp.  Chagall and Max Ernst, Kandinsky and Klint, Dali and later Pollock had left a great legacy after them; and of course a huge empty canvas stared at artists who followed them. Indian artists were struggling to depict form and meaning in terms of an Indian tradition and an evolving modernity. The colonial burden was showing and needed to be consciously upended. Freedom was in the air, and so was a new sense of existence and history. Traditional murals and frescoes engineered space in domesticated nativised architecture, and ritualized patterns emerged in a more sophisticated and customized canvas structure confined by lines and forms. Exploration and experiment came in as key phrases, and Indian art had arrived. There are many great artists in the present, but their language and idiom has stylized itself into clumsy narratives for the market space. Auctions and advertisements billboards and hoardings curators and collectors have sorely disfigured the artist’s countenance that there is no identity left for the struggling will to be free and the enterprising brush with destiny. Art is never left free in the present but marketed and commented upon, narrated, explained and carted away to be stashed safely in future vaults.

I invoked the older path of tradition and suffering, of exploration and experience: walked alone and free, discovered, befriended and subverted empty space, trained my self to see and sense the trajectory of the line that my hand shapes in pencil and brush, traced natural forms and figures, found and lost textures and styles, misplaced memories and desires, hoped and hated. I experienced my own freedom to discover that paths are made by walking. I paint out of necessity. I paint because I must. I have traveled and seen, traversed many cultures and styles, discussed and debated across traditions and experiments.

I love my work, I enjoy the experience, I feel the excitement in my hand, heart, and brain while I work. Among the many solo exhibitions of my work so far I have traversed through many phases: Mindscapes, Ecoscapes, Treelore, Stones of Silence, Earth Signs, Rupa/Arupa, Faultlines… many such explorations remain still.

And now VIVARTA: Change and transformation, variation and diversity: the endless in-forming meaning of lines and forms, space and solidity, difference and rhythm… 

Murali Sivaramakrishnan 

Pondicherry

                  March 2009 

    

RIVERS OF MEMORY 2011

“Memory believes before knowing remembers”. (William Faulkner)

There has been a river in all I remember. Even my memories and reflections cannot hide behind anything. Their slow flow is both like a transparent piece of glass and a reflecting surface. How can the sky hide behind a river? And yet both are translucent.  At one point or even at many points the sky and the river are as one. Memories and reflections have a habit of becoming one and entangle in the living present. This becomes history. A man’s life is measured in terms of memory. Like the sea swallowing moving waters, time swallows every moving image. Like the tiny grass stem that resists gravity life always springs surprises. The rest is for us to complete.

Time and image emerge in blue. Red is the garnishing of life, the passions of the soul. Yellow is never death, but the desire for growth; purple and lilac are the very nerve centres of sky and sea, and blue is unending like life itself.

As every artist knows, the space of creation is an encounter with white and black, the prefiguring of the emerging experience, the grappling of silence and the soul. What remains till the very end is the wonder of creation, all creation. Nothing is terminated. Everything is a continuation. Forms and lines, blanks and swells, splashes and drips, the spread of slow colour. Why should any art attempt at an explanation? Isn’t all art tentative in itself?  Like life.

For me every landscape is an incomplete project of eternity.  I used to work outdoors and sketch from life.  Sometimes I withdraw and let the line takeover. After all, there are no lines in nature, no forms, no colour.  All are what we sense. It is we who bring forms into being, we attribute time and spatial being, we create dimension and desire. 

Rivers of Memory is my fourteenth solo exhibition.  These works are done in acrylic and oils. The canvas has been treated by the elements over slow time.

[From RIVERS OF MEMORY Gallery Square Circle, Kala Kendra, Bharat Nivas, Auroville, 23^rd January -3^rd February 2011]