Friday, May 5, 2017

My Aspiration

"Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically." Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)

It is a harsh truth: art will never surpass nature. “Not a single number of questions concerning the way we look at art and nature. Is man actually capable of shutting off his mind when he is creating something? Is nature ever meaningful? And, perhaps the most important question of all: is it at all possible to equate nature with culture; is it possible for them to overlap completely, to merge completely? Anyone who has seen abstractions will realize that doubtlessly this equation is impossibility, but that the aspiration to achieve it nonetheless, is what sets man apart from life all around him.

Painting with acrylic paint on paper is very different from painting on canvas. The paper is more absorbent, and so lends itself more to water-color techniques of washes and dry brush.

Landscape and vegetation, with their suggestive colors and the interlacing of their shapes, hold a powerful attraction over me. Luckily, my teachers, from grammar to high school, fostered in their students an interest in art-related subjects, and encouraged my vocation which took its course without any major hitches.

I have a romantic outlook of life, an insatiable need for beauty. I am definitely a nationalist painter. I love nature deeply, the natural environment that my contemporaries insist on destroying. I love my country and its scenery, and in spite of upsetting experiences and lack of understanding, my work and my own life will remain to the end.

My paintings are an exploration of the textures, colors and surfaces I observe in nature. I like the strength and solidity of images that are abstracted down to their most prominent colors and shapes. A sprig of leaves visible through a window on an overcast day suggests a simplified composition of grey and green in a rectangular field.
I am interested in how colors interact with each other on a textured surface and the transition of colors at the border between them. I like the idea that borders and horizons are less rigid the closer you inspect them.
I’m intrigued by how much variety exists in natural earthy surfaces, and how different patterns and surfaces form as a result of environmental changes. My latest paintings, belonging to the series “Elements and Language” explore the idea that variety in nature is like a language that we can “read” or “hear” if we choose to.


-- ARUN ANVEKAR