Between warp and weft

We know of prints of paintings by important artists – but reproductions in woven tapestries? It's a known phenomenon in the west, where well-known artists such as Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro commissioned weavers to produce tapestries of their paintings. The most famous of these, a tapestry of Picasso's iconic anti-war mural Guernica, hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

In India, however, reproductions on tapestries are all but unheard of. The only artists known to have attempted something similar were the prodigiously experimental MF Husain who, sometime in the 1990s, worked with a traditional weaver to create tapestries of his work in silk, zari, wool and Tussar. And SG Vasudev, the senior artist who was inspired by his example and spurred by the fact that B Subbarayalu, the National Award-winning traditional weaver from Venkatgiri who worked with Husain, was a fellow Bangalorean.

In the decades since, Vasudev has showed his tapestries a few times (most recently in Delhi earlier this year).

It's a painstaking process, taking three-four months to execute a single painting, its complexity evident from the intricate pattern of knots on the reverse of the tapestries. It's hung at the gallery space of the India International Centre (ICC) in such a way that it can be appreciated from both sides. "My paintings may look simple but I use a multitude of colours and shades to replicate them with thread on a tapestry. The threads have to be dyed separately and woven slowly to get the effect," Vasudev explains.

If, at one level, the tapestries make Vasudev singular among today's painters, at another level, his collaborating with a traditional craftsman is quite in keeping with his art practice. The 75-year-old is one of the founder members of Cholamandal Artists' Village, set up by a bunch of artists, mostly from Chennai, in the 1960s. The artists pooled their resources and talents together to buy land, set up a commune, and live by what they made from teaching art, designing and making things alongside traditional craftsmen, and such like. "In the '60s, no one was buying art. This was our experiment to extend art to crafts like batik," Vasudev reveals.

Vasudev has worked with traditional copper craftsmen to learn how to render his artistic vision in two-dimensional relief sculptures. "I learnt copper work from a traditional artist. Of course he found it difficult to agree with the way I was doing it."

Conversely, Vasudev has found, the traditional craftsman's often rigid mode of work can be a limitation when it comes to making contemporary works of art. "Subbarayalu," he says, for instance, "is only able to conceive traditional designs in saris, not contemporary designs."

This disjunct between contemporary art and traditional craft has only made it worse, the artist feels. "Contemporary artists should think very seriously because in India, there is a thin line between art and craft. The people who built Mahabalipuram, would you call them craftsmen or artists? The idea of this division between art and craft comes from the west," says Vasudev.

At a time contemporary Indian art seems set in a static, stagnant vocabulary that is tied to the caprices of the market, this is a bit of advice today's artists would do well to heed.