Colour calculus

B.N. Goswamy

“Let no one destitute of geometry enter my doors”. — Plato

“Colour is the place where our brain and the Universe meet….Colour has got me; I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever.” — Paul Klee

“Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes ‘life’. I recognize that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites…” 

— Piet Mondrian

For the greater part of his professional life, D.G. (that is the best way to refer to him, at least at this point) was involved with the performing arts. Working with Doordarshan in a high executive capacity, he remained engaged with the world of music and dance and theatre; he also wrote a number of stunning plays, mostly in Urdu, and kept directing them for the channel. He planned and worked; worked and planned, but always in those areas. After superannuation, or close to it, however, he somehow got drawn to the visual arts: to painting, in particular. What took him there is not easy to determine, but once he went there, so to speak, he stayed there. Much in the manner of the great Swiss painter, Paul Klee, who said once that ‘colour has got me… it has got me forever’, colours and shapes ‘got him’, became his new world, as it were.

It would be fair to say that he began a bit gingerly. Attracted by the idea of collaging — ‘composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another’, as the formal definition has it — he would fill a surface with snippets of images by great masters: van Gogh’s chair, for instance, Manet’s lunching party, Seurat’s stippled ballerina, Bhupen Khakhar’s brooding face, all tilted, torn out of context, jostling one another to the point of unease. But this did not last long. Very soon, he turned towards the purity of shapes and the tactile seduction of textures. He would assemble all kinds of papers and cardboards and plastic sheets, and sit surrounded by them gazing at each, making up his mind, cutting them up in different shapes and sizes. And then compose them in his mind. The process of putting them together naturally followed: cerebration, decision, trial and error, and the like. Traditional materials held for him great attraction: the sacred mauli thread for instance, pieces of hessian, coarsely woven uparna-like fabric, strips of embroidered ribbons. Everything became grist to his churning, artistic mill. It would not be easy to dis-entangle the skeins of his thought: Were there childhood memories here? An innate reverence for the sacred? Sights of struggling small-town shopkeepers and their goods? Interestingly, the bits and pieces that he picked for turning into images were not all placed — collaged — at the same level on the surface: some rose, others dipped, still others peeped over the walls of their neighbours, and so on. Even the edges of the total composition remained uneven at times. But somehow it all worked.

Hard-edged shapes — squares and triangles and circles and rectangular strips — in various colours and configurations one would have naturally expected to figure in D.G.’s completely abstract work, and they did, each shape and colour setting up a dialogue with the one next to it. Not every colour was intense, not everything glowed with an inner fire, but a quiet, whispered conversation one could hear snatches of. But there also were works in which one could see a kind of frenzy: two circles made up of strips of coloured paper that seemed to be whirling at a dizzying speed, paper strip piled upon paper strip and in the centre, at the heart of the circle, gaping holes through which other things, other sights, could be seen, even as a dark, lurking gloom surrounded everything. This is the way it has gone on, this work, over a number of years.

One of the more recent works, a tall ‘canvas’ — that, however, is not the right word, I know — appears to me to have been something of a tribute to the genius of Paul Klee who played with colours and shapes in the subtlest of manners. In this, the work titled ‘As Darkness Lifts’, the eye moves slowly, leisured-fashion, from dark edges towards the centre where a certain light begins to glow. There is no aura, no intensity, in the centre but a gentle spread of light — rectangles and squares of different shades, yellows and reds and light greens, overlapping and dove-tailing — suggesting the breaking of dawn, as it were. Inevitably, perhaps, a couplet of Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi’s comes to mind, at least to my mind:

Sansanaate hain andherey to laraztey kyun ho?

Har nayi subah ki takhleeq yun-hi hoti hai.

[Why do you shudder when shadows gather and darkness seethes?

Surely, this is how each morn arrives, triumphant.]

Post-Script:

To clarify: D.G. are the initials of Devinder Goswamy.