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Faces of B.D. Dethan

All the artistic phases in B D Dethan's long, illustrious career feature in the exhibition now on at the Contemporary Art Gallery

PHOTO: VIPINCHANDRAN

CREATIVITY BARED Artist B.D. Dethan and his paintings

"The only claim I have to make is that I have been painting continuously for the last 40-41 years," declares artist B. D. Dethan. And all the years spent with the easel, paint and canvas, and a plethora of other mediums have resulted in the retrospective that is on show at the Contemporary Art Gallery from August 5. The show will be on till August 10.

Although the exhibition is not wholly representative of the four decades spent painting, the paintings were representative of significant phases of his artistic evolution. The paintings have been displayed in the gallery's five rooms, each room dedicated to a phase and a medium. "I paint in series, every phase of my creativity is devoted to a particular medium. I may spend a year, two or three painting in a particular way, and once I feel I have explored that medium to the fullest I move on to the next," says Dethan.

An alumnus of Government School of Arts (re-christened College of Fine Arts), Thiruvananthapuram, B. D. Dethan has won numerous awards instituted by the Kerala Lalitha Kala Akademi. Some of the places that his works are displayed are the National Museum of Modern Art Gallery, Delhi, Kendra Lalith Kala Academy, Delhi, Kerala Lalitha Kala Akademi, Thrissur and Raj Bhavan, Thiruvananthapuram.

Be it the series `Kali', `Shadows', `Faces', or `Parinamam', each series is very different from the other. One comes away with the feeling of having seen different sensibilities at work. If, for `Kali' Dethan has used pen and ink, for `Faces' it is charcoal, and in `Parinamam' he has used dry pastels. "I have used dry pastels for `Parinamam', which is essentially a technique that involves painting on black paper," he clarifies. As a series `Parinamam' stands out and makes an impact, in terms of treatment, medium and creative expression. The series `Kali' was published in the format of a book with a preface by Dr. Ayyappa Panicker, and with opinions of eminent personalities such as Sugatha Kumari, M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Malayatoor Ramakrishnan among others.

Of the nude paintings that constitute a significant part of his retrospective, he sounded defensive, "I painted the nudes, not because I wanted to paint nudes. My interest lay in the technique that was involved in painting these nudes. It was a bit complicated and challenging. I have used oil paints which are opaque, but in the painting they assume a transparency which is not very easy to achieve." On the surface, the profusion of colours in the series `Shadows' seems to offset the starkness and sense of foreboding that `Kali' and `Faces' create. The effect is superficial, the abstracts, albeit colourful, generate uneasiness, a kind of disconnect between what the series is supposed to stand for and what it actually represents. The retrospective creates an unmistakable and inescapable sense of uneasiness, a fact that Dethan acknowledges.

"I have enough experience and know enough art to please people, but that is not what I intend to do with my art. For instance, there is no beauty in the `Faces' series, but it was intentional. I want to provoke thought, and so no doubt my paintings are disturbing."

SHILPA NAIR ANAND

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