ART
Avians as motifs
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Though her latest series is entirely composed of birds, Premalatha Seshadri tells SHALINI UMACHANDRAN that she is no ornithologist but just an artist ....
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"Birds of the Cauvery", 2003-2004
HERS is work that draws a fine line between exploring spaces and leaving them be. And the line is the weapon of choice that artist Premalatha Seshadri uses to communicate ideas and let the viewer discover areas visually.
Her latest series "Birds of the Cauvery" uses simple, stark lines in black on white with occasional streaks and patches of colour. The forms are almost childlike — precise lines out of a toddler's follow-the-steps-to-draw-a-bird book. The result is a celebration of birds. The walls of the gallery in Chennai, where her works were on display, were covered over with birds in conversation, birds fluffing their plumage, haughty birds, silly birds, birds in flight, constrained birds, birds frolicking in a garden — "it's just a celebration of birds," says the Bangalore-born-Chennai-based artist.
Her strokes are simple and fluid, suggesting the various moods of the birds she loves so much. "This is simplicity in abstraction. The forms suggest themselves strongly to the viewer. My art will be baffling to people used to conventional art. This is even further away from contemporary art." The paring down of detail and wide spaces is definitely different. Premalatha does not limit herself to particular media, instead using felt-tipped pens, pencils, colour pencils, watercolours and even crayons and calligraphy pens to create the straightforward strokes of the birds' plumage. Her restriction is instead in the use of colours — black, brown and ochre dominate her seemingly skeletal figures, with sporadic strips of blue, green or red.
Premalatha Seshadri
Though she trained at the College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai, and was a British Council scholar at Hornsey College of Art, U.K., where she dabbled in oils, inks, printmaking and even etching, she made the decision to move towards calligraphy because of the fluid grace and infinite possibilities of suggestion in the line. "It was a conscious decision to concentrate on calligraphy for the suppleness of lines. I use abbreviated calligraphic marks to develop my pictures. Wavy lines are suggestive of water," she says indicating a painting from her earlier Zen-Water series. Inspired by Zen philosophy, this series completed during the late 1980s and early 1990s, represents all things associated with water, flora and fauna of the water world. By removing one dimension completely, she says, she gained new perception of areas and balancing space that has not been worked upon.
The evolution in her work — from the mid-1980s "Hunt" series to "Zen Water" to "Birds of the Cauvery" (1992-98) — is obvious, almost as if she has discarded extra baggage over the years of painting and now is travelling with the barest minimum. The lines are now sparser, colours fewer and unfilled spaces larger. All the spaces are carefully planned, explains the artist who has held shows all over the country and in Bangladesh, the U.K., and the United States. Premalatha also has a book of poetry to her credit, which she says was written over the course of 20 years, though published only in 2003.
"There are no accidents in my work. Every line is deliberated upon. I didn't sit with pots of paint and splash it around. Even artists who do that have some amount of deliberation and planning about using the space on their canvas." She says she knows how she is going to fill or not fill her paper before she begins work — ideas don't grow on her, they're already there. "People are used to seeing spaces filled up entirely. But my work has spontaneous appeal because the eye is constantly seeking order and measuring new things. The eye keeps looking at things afresh so negotiating the spaces and lines becomes different each time you look at the painting.
Though her latest series is entirely composed of birds, her fascination for depicting the avian began in Srirangam in 1974. To her, birds represent a strange world of haughty feathered creatures complete with a vocabulary of their own and codes of conduct and honour. "I haven't tired of them yet. I feel birds lend themselves to compositional elements and picture making more than any other subject. I still haven't exhausted them. They're really marvellous things to watch. I'm not an ornithologist; I don't even use a pair of binoculars while I observe them. I'm just an artist who has selected this particular object of nature for pictorial representation," says Premalatha, who with her art invites the viewer "to walk unchartered walks,/cross nameless seas, make/marks into ether", as her poem "Lavender Landscape" goes.
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