Of crystals and chocolate wrappings

Olaf Van Cleef Arbustini, scion of the Van Cleef family and a counsellor for high-range jewellery to Cartier’s has a unique India connection. A traveller, writer and painter, his paintings have been inspired by Indian themes — a result of over 50 visits to the country. A set of Arbustini’s paintings were on display at  the Coomarswamy Hall, Mumbai recently.  Francis H D’Sa reports 

It all started some months ago when Olaf Van Cleef Arbustini’s agent, Manob Tagore asked him if he was ready to do an exclusive set of paintings for an NGO in Mumbai.

Arbustini, 58, jumped at the idea. After all, India’s occupies a huge space in his mind.
“India is not a country, it is a subcontinent,” he says referring to the sheer vastness of the place that he has visited so many times.

To put together the paintings for Concern India, Arbustini drew upon his Indian experiences which he says are now pretty much a part of his subconscious. His paintings reflect that. “Painting for me is like therapy,” he told DNA on the phone from Paris

“When I paint, I may even sleep well after 3 am.  Earlier, I’d get on the phone to talk to friends but they were not happy with me calling them at this wee hour. Then one day,  I got this idea of working with an old box of water colours….”

Arbustini’s earlier works were abstract, using ‘violent’ colours like orange and flashy green, Chinese inks and natural pigments  but all these visits to India have made him ‘sensitive to Indian colours, smells, persons, monuments, and religions.’ That was amply evident in the paintings on display at the Coomaraswamy, where he used, water colours embroidered with Swarovski crystals and chocolate wrappings.

The use of chocolate wrappings is perhaps, unique to his work. He gets chocolate wrappings, which most of us would just throw away, from as far as Japan, New York, the Netherlands and Argentina through friends, which he uses in his works of art.

Each painting can take a minimum of 200 hours, and the 25 at the Coomaraswamy show the meticulousness with which he handled the themes such as The Ramayana and The Mahabharat, Indian princes and princesses, fireflies and fireworks etc.

Asked how his overall Indian experience has been, he says, ” When I first visited Calcutta in 1985, I was asked, ‘why Calcutta, this is terrible…..but the truth is that it is one of my favourite cities. I consider it the cultural capital of the country thanks to Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, Satyajit Ray who lived there. I am very obsessed by the image of the city portrayed by Dominique Lapierre in his book City of Joy and then who can forget the late Mother Teresa?

But apart from the influence that Indian themes and traditions have had on his art, there is a spiritual or more meditative side to Arbustini’s India experiences.

 “India is one place where I  have  found serenity.  I still have memories of my first visit to Mumbai, 20 years ago. I didn’t head for the hotel but took a car to the Banganga Tank. I cannot remember how long I stayed there but it must have been two to three hours.”

For Arbustini, the offer to do exclusive paintings for an NGO was most appealing. “In the fondness of my heart I thought, if you give a little, you have a little, if you give a lot, you  perhaps receive a lot more in another life.”

Explaining what went into his paintings, Arbustini says, “With the crystal gems of Swarovski, one can play with colours. The sheer variety of shades in green, in blue, so many in cream is amazing,” he says.  Typically, Arbustini uses, depending on the size of his paintings, anywhere between 500 and  2000 crystals in a single  painting. Then there are the chocolate wrappers. They may be just one millimeter in size but along with the crystals, the effect they create is unique.

As Arbustini puts it, “There are a lot of details waiting to be discovered…it may well be a mango, snake, birds, flowers and elephants that form a collage of Indian memories.”

About his family,  he has this to say. “My great grandfather began cutting diamonds in 1915. My great-grandmother, Magda Van Cleef taught me as my mother died when I was barely 18 months. When I think about my childhood, walking with Magda on the Riviera, I can only see diamonds in front of my eyes She wore all kinds of diamonds- five carats on the right hand, and seven carats on the left. Today, I work with Cartier’s because I love jewellery. My favourites are  tiger necklaces, bamboo earrings and bracelets. “When I enter an Indian temple, I see the Gods with so many jewels that I feel surrounded by precious stones all the time.”
d_francis@dnaindia.net