Celebration of form and colour

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Strap: He may never have created for an audience, but celebrated artist Akbar Padamsee’s art, rooted in precise grammar, aesthetics and philosophical traditions, will enthral generations

Nonika Singh

“The conscious mind is like a monkey bitten by a scorpion. It is never still. As a result most of our unconscious feelings escape us. An artist needs to be in silence.”

A man of profound words, celebrated artist Akbar Padamsee (April 12, 1928 – January 6, 2020) actually believed in the art of silence, in reflection and contemplation, in paying heed to his inner self. From that inner voice of conviction emanated an imagery of thinking heads, spiritually redolent metascapes and arresting nudes. Whatever form he may have considered supreme, noted artist Prem Singh can sense a harmonious wholeness in Padamsee’s creations.

Belonging to a generation of artists born in the pre-Independence era, this modernist’s real journey began when he accompanied fellow artist SH Raza on a scholarship to France. It was in Paris that he was exposed to the works of greats like Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Modigliani. He also began working with surrealist painter Stanley Hayter. Whatever he may have imbibed from international experience, it was the deep well of Indian philosophy and tradition that truly spurred his creative impulses.

“He was one of the few artists to create pure landscapes. Prior to it, in Indian artists’ oeuvre of landscapes, emotions reigned supreme,” Prem Singh believes. Padamsee’s iridescent landscapes, dubbed as metascapes (metaphysical landscapes), drew inspiration from Sanskrit texts. Says Niyatee Shinde, curator and art writer, “These were not just landscapes but went way beyond our formal understanding of landscapes.” Ditto for his nudes, mostly women, for which he may have invited charges of obscenity. However, critics read them as a continuum of landscapes with a little sexuality. He would call his nudes “dressed in shadow.”

Padamsee’s oft-repeated quote, “An artist has to be a mathematician and a poet”, which was often used to describe his artistic sensibilities, spoke volumes of his mathematical preciseness. His astute understanding of the grammar of art also stemmed from his training at JJ School of Art, Bombay. If he grasped the anatomy of his subject fully, he could draw its inner essence equally easily. As Singh says, “We all see forms as they exist, he could see what lay beyond or even within. The face that emerges on the mindscape is not the same as we encounter with naked eyes. He possessed the uncanny ability of transferring the latent energy within forms.”

There is energy in colours too and who could control it better than him. A master colourist, in his hands, rather the tip of his knife, colours moved with astonishing skill, moving from high speed to a screeching halt. Like a musical octave? Indeed, in an interview during one of his rare visits to Chandigarh, he agreed that there is a correlation between the wavelength of sound and that of colours.

Deepak Shinde, a noted artist based in Mumbai, his student and later friend, was always awestruck by his creative process. Shinde remembers him as an artist whose work would evolve on the canvas itself. “He could render the colour of pigment and used knife to paint directly on canvas, an unenviable feat that few have been able to master,” says Shinde.

He also recalls an all-important lesson that the master artist, one of his three mentors, proffered to him: “Art must resonate with tension.” Shinde elaborates how Padamsee emphasised the need to impregnate paintings with conflict, take tautness to its zenith. Just like an elastic band is stretched to the point of breaking. And Padamsee broke barriers of mediums, subjects…

Unlike bizarre experiments of today or as he himself would put it, “experimentation for the sake of experimentation,” he would follow no fads or isms. Yet, he was ahead of his times, even used plastic emulsion, a precursor to acrylics, as a medium. The films, he made in 1969, compelled acclaimed film director Ashim Ahluwalia to reconstruct his 16 mm film, Events In A Cloud Chamber. Besides, briefly foraying into digital art, there was his astounding collection of photographs. “Photography,” he said, “is not about what you do, but what you see.” Niyatee, who has documented photo history, recalls one in particular. “The way sunlight played on the nude form hovering by the window, it was no ordinary photograph, but redolent with many layers and meanings.”

If his friend and contemporary MF Husain was a people’s artist, Padamsee was often called a thinker artist, even painter’s painter. For his deep sense of aesthetics, Shinde would rather call him a ‘painterly painter’. But there is no denying his intellectual vigour and philosophical leanings all of which informed his art. Back in time, as a young man of, 25 he may have said in jest, “I am 25,000 years old”, but his works at once influenced by Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalam and Chinese philosophy carry within themselves a legacy of centuries. Fetching astronomical sums at art auctions, his art is as timeless.

“Works today are being hailed as avant-garde without passing the ultimate litmus test of time…” he once professed, perhaps as a lamentation. His works, however, will continue to qualify on all counts and parameters known to the art world.