An interactive show at Piramal Art on how different artists create art

Most of modernist artist Jehangir Sabavala's paintings involved geometric fragments that formed a soufflé of clouds, evergreen trees, exiled people, a lone ship, etc., all looming against a barren background. Each painting bore a cubist bent of style, where each figure or object was broken into fragments. But how he coloured each fragment was no act of randomness. 

Pop by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) to view one of his unfinished canvases on permanent display. It resembles one of those colouring books where each section of a painting is assigned a number that coincides with a particular colour that the colourist is required to fill up the section with. While Sabavala stretched time to complete each painting, fellow artist FN Souza was on the far end of this meticulousness. In a February 8, 1976 article in the Patriot Magazine, Souza recounts how the day he got expelled from the JJ School of Art, the first thing the angry artist did on coming home was grab a large piece of plywood meant for constructing his mother's cutting table, and paint on it The Blue Lady (1945) in the “white heat of an hour”. Despite their different approach to pace and technique, both Sabavala and Souza are exalted for their individual style and technique. 

At the same time, the colours they used were courtesy Camlin, the desi brand born in 1931 in accordance with the anti-British Swadeshi movement – the call to use only Indian-made goods and services – founded by a chemist, who held R&D exercises with topmost artists to finalise a spectrum of inks and paints.

A new exhibition, Making Art: Materials and Technology at Piramal Art gallery, analyses the different painting styles of different Indian master artists and parallelly studies how the painterly materials they've used, developed over time under Camlin's wing. Curators Vaishnavi Ramanathan and Ashvin E Rajagopalan chose six mediums – charcoal, ink and graphite (pencil); sculpture, paints and prints, photography and digital media to present original artworks by the likes of KG Subramanyan, Krishen Khanna, Laxma Goud, Ranbir Kaleka, and free materials from each medium to propel viewers to get their hands messy and create their own works of art. And so, the display has many offerings: a rotunda table with 40 seats and a free supply of charcoal stubs, crayons, lead pencils and paper to scribble; a polaraid camera for those candids; an interactive digital work that lets you collage your dream lover choosing facial features of Bollywood stars; blobs of clay and readymade moulds; shred notes in a pasta maker and mix these in cement within a tile mould with the Thukral & Tagra ongoing series. You can study the diverse sculpting processes by artists Debi Prasad Roy Choudhury and Meera Mukherjee. Choudhury always made a maquette (scale model) before he'd attempt a larger-than-life creation, and here, on display, is his small-scale model of Mahatma Gandhi from the Dandi March sculpture series on Marina Beach in Chennai and Sardar Patel Marg in New Delhi. Mukherjee used the metal casting tradition of dhokra from Bastar district in Chhattisgarh. Viewers can attempt one/both/create a hybrid of the style/s using the available tools. 

“There is a certain joy to feel and smell paint, work with clay... a sensuality how ink touches the paper, which all printmakers relish. The idea for the show came from the writings of American art historian James Elkins, who alludes that if art historians/writers want to understand [Claude] Monet, they should paint like Monet. That's why we wanted this show to be visceral,” says Ramanathan.

Making Art: Materials and Technology Piramal Tower, Lower Parel West On view till June 15