Monumental blend
MITA KAPUR
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The mural has evolved gracefully merging tradition with contemporary rhythms.
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"A mural has to blend in and yet stand out. It has to attract a passer by in a few seconds. It is art that touches the `real' people, it touches the lives of many people."
Narrative voice: A mural is strictly neither a painting nor architecture or sculpture, though it employs elements of all the three.
NOWHERE is a wall more alive and spirit better united with matter than in a mural. A mural gives a wall a narrative voice. It requires a sensitive artist to delve into his own depths to be able to make it into a landmark, metaphorical as well as literal.
To a layman, a mural is a blend of a painting, sculpture and architecture. For Satish Gujral, the mural grew out of his painting. His intense involvement with this medium has spanned periods of realisation in which the mural appeared to him to be the most forceful form of communication and the most relevant one for an imagination like his that cried out for the big and monumental.
Reality of the wall
Technically, murals are a category of art in themselves. A mural is strictly neither a painting nor architecture or sculpture, though it employs elements of all three. A mural has to base itself on the reality of the wall. "It is essentially a part of architecture, it must have gravity and volume to be in harmony with the rest of the structure," says Gujral.
A mural is an orchestration of aesthetic sensibilities put to work in balance with the dramas of the inner self. The fact that the word `mural' immediately brings to mind the caves at Ajanta gives relevance to this art form's function as a social and environmental entity. Primitive man's depiction of fantasies, decoration and magic symbols was quite consciously undertaken. Whether as paintings in Ajanta or the folk motifs on mud houses in Rajasthan's villages, the mural has evolved as an art form gracefully merging tradition with contemporary rhythms. Just as Gujral has employed folk motifs using wood, ceramic and glass to create rich textures in endless variations in limited space in his mural at the Intercontinental Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi.
In India, painted walls have always been the usual form of decoration both in sacred and secular buildings. Extensive literary records of ancient murals exist in Indian literature. The interiors of ancient Indian temples and palatial buildings were plain compared to the exterior and offered an obvious ground for painting. Frames or mouldings did generally not circumscribe this. It continued to cover the entire surface and flowed from one wall on to another in an organic way undivided by harsh barriers. The large surfaces were used for the depiction of epic themes, myths and beliefs known and loved. This made the mural as an art form to be an expression of a comparatively homogeneous society.
Famous examples of classical murals are those at Ajanta, Bagh, Badami, Sittannavasal, while the medieval style is seen at Ellora, the Brihadisvara temple in Thanjavur and the Vira bhadra temple at Lepakshi. Numerous temples and palaces in regions as diverse as Punjab, Himalayas, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have murals of a later period. The tradition is continuous and diverse. It takes on regional characteristics and also varies according to the period of execution.
In modern times, the position of the artist in society has changed. K.G. Subramanyan has voiced his thoughts in support of murals and architectural space working in cohesion. "Our best examples of mural painting or sculpture are where the artists and architects have worked together or were the same people. This was the practice centuries ago, or again where the works grow on each other in a non-combative way as in folk environment."
Contemporary Indian muralists have learnt their lessons from the grand masters like Nand Lal Acharya and Narsingh Lal from Jaipur. The Jaipur technique demands geometrical distribution of space, a colour scheme of contrasting and jubilant tonalities, absence of linearism and an abandonment of finer details.
The contemporary mural has taken the dimensions of space in terms of geometry and use of colour schemes forward although richness of texture is achieved by using newer material like concrete, metals, wires, tiles, ceramic, glass, even scrap and waste. The layering done in the Jaipur technique in effect resembles the process in the Italian frescoes. The Italian wet process that gives the thickness and opacity of colour in Benodebehari's work comes from Cennini.
Surinder Joshi's first mural "Beyond the City" at the IIHMR, Jaipur, was created on a waterproof board using marble dust, acrylic paints, metallic objects, wooden pieces, aluminium wire, copper and brass sheets. Drawing images from his childhood spent in Haridwar and Rishikesh, he felt, "a mural has to blend in and yet stand out. It has to attract a passer by in a few seconds. It is art that touches the `real' people, it touches the lives of many people."
Folk and urban motifs
For Joshi, K.G. Subramanyan's fresh approach to folklore and culture, working with terracotta and concrete, gave his murals a different flavour. Joshi's mural at the IOC building in New Delhi is perhaps the country's largest mural in wood. Symbols of the Earth, a lantern as a traditional source of light, a wheel, a jharokha, birds and flowers — interestingly done in different colours of wood with iron, brass and aluminium.
The mural "Persistence of Energy" speaks subtly of the need to create harmony between nature and man, development and ecology, between traditional and the modern, the old and the new. A mosaic in wood, a collage of folk and urban motifs, a texture of sober shades and a rhythm of energy that persists and turns everything into a work of art.
Murals speak to people. On buildings, on interfaces or in the interiors, it creates an atmosphere that provokes thought and appreciation for the images it portrays.
It is art for the people and by the people — in making a mural the artist cannot separate himself from the one reality that tempers the entire texture of his creation: that he himself is essentially a social animal.
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