I'm just at the start of a project which focusses on the intersection of ritual, philosophy, story, and aesthetics in 10th Century India. I have no clear ideas at the moment about what will happen. I just know that I love the fact that art in India, historically, at least, was completely interwoven with everyday routine, intellectual thought, and 'religious' observances (there's a big question mark over the idea of what we think of as 'religion' in India, both then and now).
In the classic texts relating to art, the different art forms were themselves all seen as connected with each other:
The knowledge of iconography depends upon the correct understanding of the rules of both sculpture and painting; a true mastery in the latter is unattainable without a knowledge of the art of dancing, which is again supplementary to one's full acquaintance with the science of music...
For now, I'm focussing on dance. I've started by beginning to study my photographs of carved stone reliefs at the temples at Tanjavur and Chidambaram in South India, and cast bronzes created around the same time as these temples under rule of the Chola kings. This period is often seen as a high point of Indian art, although this is likely to be an aesthetic judgement strongly influenced by European values. Nonetheless, the forms, particularly of the Chola bronzes, are quite extraordinary.
I'm fascinated simply by the process of exploring these forms with paint or pencil. I've only done a few so far (here). Each dancer seems to have a different personality, which seems to partly be due to how I manage to render the face. This, in turn, at least for the stone reliefs, depends upon how the stone has weathered on that part of the image.
The knowledge of iconography depends upon the correct understanding of the rules of both sculpture and painting; a true mastery in the latter is unattainable without a knowledge of the art of dancing, which is again supplementary to one's full acquaintance with the science of music...
For now, I'm focussing on dance. I've started by beginning to study my photographs of carved stone reliefs at the temples at Tanjavur and Chidambaram in South India, and cast bronzes created around the same time as these temples under rule of the Chola kings. This period is often seen as a high point of Indian art, although this is likely to be an aesthetic judgement strongly influenced by European values. Nonetheless, the forms, particularly of the Chola bronzes, are quite extraordinary.
I'm fascinated simply by the process of exploring these forms with paint or pencil. I've only done a few so far (here). Each dancer seems to have a different personality, which seems to partly be due to how I manage to render the face. This, in turn, at least for the stone reliefs, depends upon how the stone has weathered on that part of the image.
Today I saw, for the second time, how easily the form becomes static. The original, carved in stone, has such life (there is a specific intention here, if I remember rightly, about the figure being rendered in such a way to show the prana, or life force, which animates the body). I'm trying to be quite loose and impressionistic, but at the moment many of my images are missing this sense of life, the animation of the originals.
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