Call of nature’s children

Ramya Sarma meets painter and photographer JP Singhal

Bare-breasted adivasi women gaze out of simple wooden frames. Each jewel the girls wear, from the simplest bead necklace to ornate silver earrings, is painstakingly detailed, every curve and facet depicted with almost photographic reality.

The faces, too, have a celluloid imagery about them.  These tribals have been painter-photographer JP Singhal’s leitmotif for years.

Soon after he came to Mumbai from Meerut in 1959, the 72-year-old Singhal recalls, at a time  his focus was mythological paintings, he went on a trip to Nashik. “I met two adivasi girls bathing in the rain. Their innocence and beauty struck me even through their dirty clothes. I started doing a series of works with the girls and with market scenes. While city dwellers wear many faces — mourning in the morning and partying at night, the villagers are more open and honest about how they feel. They are  nature’s children.”

In the ’60s and ’70s, his name became synonymous with calendar art, done in a photo-realistic style, with lush, rustic scenes and matka-carrying tribal women in diaphanous saris.  “It was an experience of learning, earning and fame of which I didn’t find myself worthy. The fear that I could lose my clients made me work harder,” he says.

Later he joined the film world. His popularity soared as struggling actors from all over the country came to him for portfolios. Singhal remembers, “Sunil Dutt wanted his son Sanjay transformed from a girlish young man who looked like his mother, to someone more manly. I trained him to face the camera.”

Soon Raj Kapoor asked him to create a look for Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram. “I tried not to make her vulgar and modelled her look on the adivasi girls I knew so well, but Rajsaab changed it with backlighting, wet saris and no bra.” Of his film work,  he says,  “I  lost more than I gained — my patience, my focus, my artistic inspiration. Soon I started finding my own soul again through painting.”

JP Singhal, paintings, JJ Institute of Applied Art, last day today.