Accidental Blogger

On my last trip to India, I did not have an opportunity to go to an art gallery or museum but I did have two enjoyable art related encounters. One was the search I undertook for a recently published but hard- to- find book about my first art teacher, the late Abani Sen, which put me in touch with his son whom I had last seen as a school girl. The other was meeting artist Mimi Radhakrishnan who later pleasantly surprised me with a gift of the book I was looking for. 

Mimi is an artist and a published author of fiction. In fact, I had read her book of short stories several years before I met her in person. During a meeting in her home, I had the pleasure of touring Mimi’s studio. I saw several finished paintings as well as some works in progress in preparation for an upcoming exhibition in 2009. (An added treat was viewing a few samples of her husband, renowned sculptor Radhakrishnan’s superb creations)

Trained in Kalabhavan, the art school at the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore at  Shantiniketan, Mimi began her artistic career as a print maker. Her "crossover" to the realm of painting is thoroughly joyful and well received as attested to by the following profile.

We normally use two categories of artists- one trained in an art school as opposed to the naïve autodidact. But Mimi insists that even an artist, highly skilled in a specific medium, may step into the territory of the latter exemplified by her own transition from printmaking to painting. At the time of deep crisis while wrestling with the intractability of oil painting, she would draw strength from her memory, of what Ramkinker Baij used to tell his students about how he learnt about the technique of painting: it was from a salesman at the G C Laha paint shop in Calcutta that Kinker discovered the joy of oil painting and paints’ changing texture and viscosity when mixed with linseed oil and turpentine!

So how would a printmaker handle paint? It is in this crucial question that I locate a contemporary concern in the disjuncture between her technique and her content. The technique of oil painting taken up by her allows direct contact with the surface of the canvas but the form that builds up under the execution of her brush draws from a repertoire of the always and already seen, known and experienced. In the Swirl Called China is a mis-en-scene of images considered Chinese in tourism brochures. No wonder that in the titles of her works, there is a recurring reference to “memory”. At the level of content, she registers the mediatedness, a necessary technical imperative in printmaking but now applied to a mode of representation. This makes her combine the expressionist potential of oil painting, essentially stroke based with a printmaker’s obsession with the procedural, working from one palimpsest to another. Again, her writer’s acumen of writing page after page translated well into painting layer after layer, as if a long narrative and strings of characters have been telescoped into a painterly spectacle.

Indeed. In executing her paintings, Mimi wears the additional hats of a print maker and story teller. Many of her paintings are framed by a "border" – like a sari or an embroidered shawl. The backgrounds  are textured with print like motifs – fish scales, floral, water lines. The story-like character of the compositions derives from the repetition of a theme over several canvases and titles like "Holding Dodo’s Eggs in Despair" and "Masked Men in Conversation."  Characters appear and reappear through series of paintings. Friends meet at the foot of a mountain in one panel. They begin a journey in the next and reach a magical destination in the third. In one painting the bearded sage Chamatkari Baba lands among expectant devotees. Then they gather to celebrate with abandon. In the final canvas one of them receives the Baba’s final blessings. There is a dream like quality to the paintings like the tales of a fabulist. In all of them, Mimi pointed out to me what the figures may be "thinking" and where they are "going."  Notice the three portraits I have posted below the fold. They belong to a series representing Muslim women of India with names like Dr. Jahanara Begum, Professor Nusrat Rizvi and Miss Niloufer, B.Sc. III Yr. The portraits are of imaginary women. Mimi gives them names and educational credentials that evoke real personalities and vocations. The two Istanbul pieces illustrate the artist’s knack for mural like compositions, juxtaposing related human figures, artifacts and edifices as parts of a larger commentary.

Mimi’s artistic eye and training spill over into her surroundings – in her tastefully designed home and the lush garden she has planted in her backyard, an unexpected and pleasing oasis amidst the overdeveloped urban south Delhi neighborhood. She is also an ardent and unapologetic cat lover. Three cats share her home and garden with Mimi. Her husband claims that during the course of the day she has more conversations with her tabby Baichung than she does with him. The title of her last exhibition (all the paintings posted here are from that show) was Twisted Tales – Between Images and Words. My second meeting with Mimi lasted a little over two hours. During that time she and I discussed our cats for nearly forty five minutes. That might strike some who don’t understand cats, as a twisted tale of sorts!      

Please turn the page for the thumbnail images of some of Mimi’s paintings – be sure to click for enlargement.
 

The three portraits are oil on Papier-mâché and the remaining two, oil on canvas. In the order they appear:

Amina Bano Bibi; Miss Niloufer B.Sc. III Yr.; Dr. Jahanara Begum LMF; Weaving Memory Excerpts from Istanbul; Framed by a Tourist Map.