A painter of light and wind
Nonika Singh
A Lesser man or even an artist would have called it a day. But at 87, renowned artist, master colourist and painter Paramjit Singh is raring to go, painting with the same ardour as he did in his younger days. As he is busy creating landscapes, redolent with beauty and joy, for three upcoming exhibitions at New York, Mumbai and Ahmedabad, there isn’t a definite plan in his mind. Or agenda. He is not the one to theorise art or follow the conceptual scheme of things. His process of creation remains the same as it has for decades. Spontaneous and direct, distilling the very essence of nature.
He sits before an empty canvas, certainly not with a blank mind, but with some definite thoughts, maybe even concrete imagery. But as he puts it, “First you attack the canvas and then the canvas counter-attacks you and shows you endless ways of creation.” Of course, the root of his inspiration always is the inexhaustible reservoir of nature.
Ever since as a student of Class VIII when he chanced upon landscapes by Rabindranath Tagore in an art book in his grandfather’s library, nature has been his constant muse. Childhood memories define and shape us and even today, what he saw in nature as a child can’t be erased. He reminisces, “Those dark stormy nights, the dark hues of sky, the gusty winds that would blow during a storm… where do you find such moods of nature in Delhi.” But art is not only what your subconscious mind imbibes, it is also an education. Thus, what he learnt during college days at the School of Arts, Delhi Polytechnic, opened gateways to the world of impressionism and expressionism. The French school of impressionism, particularly artists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet and Claude Monet impacted his aesthetic sensibilities considerably. Other artists such as German expressionist Emil Nolde have influenced him too. But how the mind processes it all is as mysterious as the very art of painting. More recently, during his visit to New York, he saw these two large figurative works at a private museum which filled him with awe and wonder.
New York also brings back a flood of painful memories. Throughout the Covid period, he was in the US city where his daughter, artist Anjum Singh, was undergoing treatment for cancer. As she finally lost her battle with the deadly disease, the father in him was devastated. But the artist in him did not buckle. Like AA Milne said, “It never hurts to keep looking for sunshine.” Thus, even the four paintings he made during her sickness, he shares, “were not grim or desolate but happy-looking pain”.
But then, joy for him is not a one-dimensional emotion of exultation, rather melancholy is an integral part of it. Thus, those who see only vitality and robustness in his works or attribute the joie de vivre immanent in his landscapes to his Punjabi genes are missing the point. Not that he discounts the inner-self of the viewer. He muses, “If an artist has an inner-self, so does the art lover. Often the two could be in sync and at times in dissonance.” But the way ordinary mortals view nature and how an artist embraces the same, “there is a world of difference,” he says. As William Blake wrote, “To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” Paramjit adds, “You see the majesty of nature unfold and at best take home the image. However, an artist is stuck by the beauty of smaller things like say the light falling in between two blades of grass.” In fact, it was one such view during a walk in Himachal Pradesh that changed his visual vocabulary forever and textures became his art’s second skin.
Mastering the art of textured compositions is a painstaking exercise. Often it takes him months to finish one canvas. Creativity for him is not just picking up a brush but the rigour involved in it, right from opening colour tubes to mixing pigments to sitting for hours before the canvas. With age, the capacity to paint for hours at a stretch has diminished somewhat. But not the zeal… Today’s generation of artists might be rich, but he belongs to a generation whose lives were enriched with experiences, deep abiding engagement and drill. No wonder, each time he revisits nature, it’s a continuum of regeneration. Gary Snyder said, “Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.” And Paramjit is at home with nature, taking pride in calling himself “a painter of light, wind and pigments”.
