‘Portrait of an Artist’ takes you inside the studios of India’s renowned painters and sculptors

There is simply a connection lensman Rohit Chawla returns to again and again erstwhile describing his life’s work: trespassing. For the archetypal 4 decades of his vocation — shooting premier ministers and movie stars, artists and authors, for the covers and wrong the pages of the country’s astir prestigious magazines — helium utilized to consciousness “lucky to beryllium capable to conscionable a peculiar histrion oregon writer”. He was the interloper with the camera, grateful for immoderate the taxable chose to reveal. But thing has shifted. “Now, astatine this signifier of my life,” helium says, “I look backmost and consciousness that I beryllium successful this full thing. Now, I tin chronicle my ain beingness alternatively than trespass. I inactive usage portraiture to get to cognize the artists and creatives I respect much closely.”

This astir melancholic reflection informs his latest publication successful subtle ways. Portrait of an Artist, published by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art successful New Delhi and co-published by Mapin Publishing (₹2,500), brings unneurotic 67 portraits of Indian artists spanning generations and mediums — from S.H. Raza and Akbar Padamsee to Bharti Kher and Shilpa Gupta, from the precocious masters Tyeb Mehta and Bhupen Khakhar to younger painters specified arsenic Kulpreet Singh. The text, crystalline and unencumbered, is by the creation professional Kishore Singh.

The photographs are Chawla’s, but successful the lawsuit of those helium could not meet. And the method, arsenic ever, is spare: nary assistants, nary artificial lights, nary rearranging of spaces. “Most of the images [in the book] were conscionable maine and the creator one-on-one,” helium says. “There’s nary different idiosyncratic successful that room.” That solitude, helium believes, is what makes honesty possible, and progressively rare.

In an epoch of relentless representation management, erstwhile each mag screen passes done a retoucher’s hands and each creator has learned to execute for the lens, Chawla’s instinct is to portion the brushwood down to thing person to a conversation. He is, helium acknowledges, thing of a psychoanalyst with a camera. “Having spent astir 4 decades down it, it gives you a peculiar benignant of passageway vision,” helium says. “The camera holds this powerfulness — whoever is opposite, a premier minister, Robert De Niro, Vikram Seth, they each go human.”

Looking for calm

The book’s architecture reflects the ambition of the project, 1 that began astir accidentally erstwhile Chawla changeable Anjolie Ela Menon arsenic Frida Kahlo successful 2010. It is divided into 2 halves, the representation and the studio. Together they signifier an argument: that the moving abstraction of an creator is not a backdrop but a text, arsenic legible arsenic the enactment itself. As Kiran Nadar writes successful her foreword, “The workplace is ne'er simply a room. It is simultaneously sanctuary and battleground, meditation abstraction and laboratory, refuge and prison.” Chawla’s photographs marque this visible.

Some, similar Amit Ambalal, Akbar Padamsee, G.R. Iranna’s studios, are replete with the benignant of magnificent chaos you’d expect of an artist’s backstage originative abstraction — afloat of paints, brushes, canvases and easels. But they ever signify thing astir the artist’s process oregon worldview. The soundlessness that Surendran Nair thinks creation demands is reflected successful the cleanable geometry of his studio. Nilima Sheikh’s “beautiful, clean” workplace underlines her quest for “sukoon [calm]”, successful mild opposition to her spouse Gulammohammad Sheikh’s space, wherever helium finds home, surrounded by his books, brushes and paints and a movie projector. Arpita Singh works successful a cordoned disconnected country successful her surviving room; Jyoti Bhatt paints from his eating table. The scope is the point. No 2 studios, similar nary 2 practices, are alike.

Mithu Sen, painter, provocateur, self-described imaginable witch, lives and works successful a workplace successful Surajkund successful Haryana that seems to embody her contradictions. Open rooms lined with what Singh calls her “Museum of Unbelongings”: shelves packed with dolls, busts, a dildo, a mermaid skeleton, breasts successful assorted sizes, playing dice, dried leaves. Sen herself holds it each loosely. “If idiosyncratic says, permission this studio, I tin — without looking back,” she says. For Chawla, this is precisely the benignant of representation that resists the curated self, the performed identity.

Then determination is T. Venkanna, the Hyderabad-based creator whose canvases of corporeal bodies and lurking unit spot him successful a lineage with K. Laxma Goud and Ravinder Reddy. When Venkanna returned from Vadodara to Hyderabad successful 2023, helium built his location wrong his studio, folding room and chamber into the workspace arsenic though the thought of leaving it were fundamentally incoherent. “My caput arsenic good arsenic my psyche reside successful my studio,” says the artist. “It means everything to me. I deliberation doubly earlier leaving it to spell retired connected work.”

Some of the book’s astir indelible images beryllium to artists who are not among us, including Ram Kumar, Manjit Bawa and Tyeb Mehta. Their inclusion, alternatively than diluting the project, deepens it. As Singh writes: with their studios present silent, these portraits relation not conscionable arsenic documentation but arsenic memorial — the preservation of thing indispensable astir however they worked and thought. Archival photographs, successful immoderate cases taken by others, capable the gaps wherever Chawla’s ain lens could not reach.

Chawla is not shy astir what the publication is not. It is not a survey of existent art-world fashions; it is not a solemnisation of the provocateur oregon the conceptualist whose signifier requires a curatorial enactment to basal upright. “Any enactment which can’t basal connected its 2 legs and requires a curatorial note,” helium says, “to my caput is sheer nonsense.”

Shooting 300 authors

Chawla, who present lives and works retired of a “sparse, minimal” workplace successful Assagao, Goa, is completing a publication of portraits of 300 authors for the Jaipur Literature Festival, to people 20 years of JLF, to beryllium published successful 2027. He came to authors, helium says, retired of intimidation: helium utilized to consciousness daunted by writers, and the portraits were his mode of learning to spot them clearly.

He is besides planning, with a radical of photographers, what helium describes arsenic India’s biggest imaging festival, an lawsuit partially successful tribute to the precocious Raghu Rai, whose decease prompted an outpouring of affection that confirmed what Chawla already believed: that radical inactive hunger for photography with “form and contented and poetry”.

In a infinitesimal erstwhile artificial quality tin make a plausible representation of anything, the statement for the photograph arsenic a papers of quality interaction, of quality life, becomes some much urgent—and much hard to make. Chawla makes it anyway. “A photograph lone has worth if it is real,” helium says. “If thing really happened.”

The Mumbai-based autarkic writer writes connected culture, manner and technology.