Colours swirl and mingle in echoes of the natural world – sky, ocean-beds, foliage and feathers – organic dreams trip lightly over real things, exchanging identities and producing new worlds. Anuradha Nalapat’s paintings are spaces inhabited by plurality – of thought, feeling and experience, of life itself.
With a desire to place her art on common ground with the masses, she has made an attempt to open her exhibition to viewers. She wants viewers to share their thoughts, scribbles and writings and contribute to a session of shared discussion on Saturday December 19th between 5 PM and 6 30 PM at Time and Space Gallery. This show is part of the Bengaluru Habba Indian Art Trail.
Anuradha is a writer and poet as well as a visual artist. Pic: Lina Vincent.
Through the exhibition and interactive exercise, she wants the focus to shift from the formal aspects of the painting hung on the wall to the life experiences of Anuradha – experiences that are individual but common at the same time, experiences that do not differentiate between a person following one profession or another, experiences that just happened to be translated into paintings, or writings, or poems or performance. That space, that gave her a particular image, is being made open to everyone to make it their own.
Anuradha is a writer and poet as well as a visual artist. There are days when she spends every waking hour painting, there are also days on end when she does not touch a brush; sometimes all her time is spent writing, and other times she occupies herself with the myriad layers that life surrounds her (us) with. Her philosophies are tinged with elements of humour and satire, and paradoxically matched with a pragmatic approach to living. Her work is embedded in soliloquy; she seems to dig deep within herself and weaves strands of her very being into anything she produces, serious or lighthearted.
One of Anuradha’s writings (simple lyrical words with a complex world of meanings) goes as, “So if creativity is energy, then the nature of energy is not just creation, as we are trained to ‘see’ it, but the other side of the coin is about destruction. How so? In nature, energy is constantly flowing or is transformed from one form to another. The bud dies, the flower is created, the flower dies, and the fruit is created. Summer dies and gives way to winter; water becomes vapor, vapor condenses and we have rain. We ignore the destruction part and focus on the creation part alone. So it’s time we made peace with death!…”
Her work is embedded in soliloquy; she seems to dig deep within herself and weaves strands of her very being into anything she produces, serious or lighthearted. Pic: Lina Vincent.
The works she is currently displaying resonate with thoughts such as these, miming in their spontaneous curves and patterns the cycles of life, the ups that ultimately come down, and the downs that climb upward – like the turn of the market after the terrible recession. The swinging pendulum inscribed on many of the images marks the passage of time and the pace and movement of her own life, capturing memory, and yet proclaiming joy in today.
Looking at her paintings, seeing the swirls of humanity and the shell spirals, one feels a sense of excitement, of poetry beginning without words or images forming without frames. Go to the exhibition and the interaction to make your own stories and spaces, and you will end up recognising some of Anuradha’s spaces in it. “Hang in there, grab a piece of the sky, a piece of joy, and remain…” ⊕