Pramod Ganapatye is a painter who needs watching. For he paints with the madness of a Van Gogh and runs riots with his colours. There is lots and lots of it. And with good reason too. For he uses colour or a jolting emotional impact. Sharp and staring the viewer straight in the eye. The viewer has to swallow the first salvo before he could get the hang of it all. And one does get the hang of it, ultimately.

Pramod Ganapatye’s subjects are people, life and the landscape, all done in contemporary idiom. And what is remarkable is, that the people that populate his canvases are the ordinary folk- the folk that show some character which is in harmony with the landscape Ganapatye chooses to paint. He paints shrines in a hilly landscape with the devotees bathing or marching towards them- shrines that carry all the traditional symbolism with them. The Pond nearby meant for a bath before the obeiscance, the flag on top of the temple, and strangely enough, a Ravana in the background, Flower- plants, arches, domes – And a congenial earth and the sky…

Another remarkable thing about his figures is that they show a kind of ruggedness which can note be done away with. And all of them have a visible mass (and weight in consonance with it). It is in fact due to this weightiness that Pramod Ganapatye’s characters make their presence felt, in the same way as his landscape makes itself felt. And another interesting thing about Ganapatye’s creations is that while he uses contrasting colours to dramatize the event or highlight the characters, his landscapes display a kind of harmony that is based on the juxtaposition of the opposites. Ganapatye’s message is therefore loud but clearly artistic.

A word must of course be said about his use of space. He almost uses it like Mughal miniatures and creates extra dimensions through proliferation of the image into other segments of the frame. In this way his linear world gets transformed into a three dimensional one though it stops short of being spherical. Even the construction of his imagery is interesting. He builds up his images with very sharp and vibrant forms and figures. Typically appealing houses, terrain, flora and fauna and emotionally charged characters. And this without cramming the space or the viewer’s mind. In fact Ganapatye’s space is infinitely more accommodative than what normally a painter of his age gets it to accommodate. Ganapatye’s space imparts a sense of freedom to the viewer and that’s not a small achievement.

And the other important characteristic of Pramod Ganapatye’s paintings is that nothing is static within the frame. Each form and each character is imbued with its own dynamism- a dynamism that comes out of the fact when one reflects about these images, one comes to the conclusion that the painter has not allowed one’s eye to rest or to wander aimlessly. That one has been engaged in the drama within the frame as well as outside it (the reference part of, that is to say).
Summerising, Pramod Ganapatye has come out with some significant pieces of works that are worthy of notice. Indeed, they display a kind of promise that is rare in the art world, amidst his generation, particularly.
Kala Darshan

MOHENJODARO REVISITED

Art in it form based avatar involves a continuous struggle to reinvent the existent apparent world. From form to the spirit is a tedious and very lonely journey for an artist. Delhi based artist Pramod Ganapatye has carried this struggle to it fruition through his recent oeuvre being exhibited in one person show in Arushi gallery in Delhi.

His paintings mostly of women depict ordinary rural womenfolk that he grew up seeing in Malwa in Madhya Pradesh. The women are heavy-set and monumental. The kind of women you come across all over rural India. They are no beauties from Ajanta frescoes or the ones painted by Raja Ravi Verma--fine curvatures and doe-eyed. They are neither what you find in calendar art so ubiquitous. These women like Picasso’s Greek period work are monumental but here the similarity ends. They are not stately but ordinary Indians with their struggles, fears and the fight of daily life writ large on their faces. The figures are rendered in thick but softly roving lines. These lines render the women so soft mass of flesh more like Oblomovian characters. But this is done to emphasise the ravages that women undergoes in being a mother but also the struggle she wages to succour family.

This imparts Pramod’s women not attributes of physical perfection but the anguished mundaneness of the daily grind of life of masses of India. The history of a nation is not only of the rulers and the kings but more of the ordinary folk who never enter the hallowed hall of history. Pramod carries on in line with Indian modernist like Amrita Sher Gill, Ramkinker Baij and others who depicted the lives of rural women. But Pramod renders his women not in action but either in repose or in frozen gestures. They are lonely figures surrounded their own silence. Strangely his figures counterpoint the opposites. The monumentaily and heavy mass of the figures is contrasted with a feeling of vacuous emptiness that oozes from their sad eyes. Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus focused on the angst and existential emptiness of urban middle class milieu in Europe and T.S. Eliot in his poem The Wasteland reflects similar concerns, but Pramod breaks an outsider’s view of romanticized pastoral life to focus on the angst of village women. It is here that he succeeds with finesse through his sensitive understanding and portrayal of life of rural women in India.

The use of light in Pramod’s paintings follows a strange undefined and unpredictable pattern. There seems to be no definitive source of light and it appears to be highly whimsical. The light is independent to the source. This way of using light makes his lonely figures a bit mysterious. His colours are frugal and muted and there is no bombast or exuberance in his palette.

In keeping with the subject of his paintings namely rural women the rendering of the figures suggests naïve style. Indian folk and tribal arts are the fountainhead of free, emotive naïve expression and Pramod has rightly taken inspiration from it coming as he does from Madhya Pradesh with largest tribal population in India and a very rich folk art.

To me Pramod is reinventing the ethos of a culture that flourished in 2,65,000-sq.km area about 5000 years ago in India. We are all very much familiar with dancing girl bronze figurine from Mohenjo Daro. But these ancient people worshipped a women goddess evident innumerable female figurines found in excavations. These figures known as Mother Goddess are in naïve style and plump and heavy and evoke the motherhood so common to almost all prehistoric cultures. Pramod’s works do suggest women as ordinary individuals and also as life giving mothers deified by early Indians of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa.

Vijay Kumar
(Director & Curator (India Asia) European Artists Association Velbert Essen Germany Nativity Delhi, India)

ENDLESS CONVERSATION

Involve in profound, intimate, mutual, and animated discussion/ expressing with intense and serious gestures/ to be told not to be told/ has been hidden smartly near door/ road side/cafeteria/ tea stall/ or some remote corner/ repeatedly engaged in restricted, provocative, hatching conspiracy/pretend to be innocent/ occupied in restless and useless chat/ talking deliberately with few chosen people/showing something of tremendous significance/ some time appear religiously sitting in meditation/ the philosophical, careful, deep, silent, constant and endless conversation/ all this continuously happening in our day to day life is the source of my drawing and painting.

THE MOON IN HIS POCKET

Pramod Ganapatye is an ardent admirer of modern Hindi poetry and likes the poetry of Sarveshwer Dayal Saxena for its sensitive graphic quality।

At one point he studied and painted the chromatic character of astrological signs। He was totally into abstraction in time and space.

While Reading Sarveshwar Dayal’s poems he would wonder about the justification for going abstract. Pramod became a seedling again and started afresh. The seedling struggled to open its seed leaves.

He wanted to come face to face with ‘Man and the complex environ’. He would often find, like Sarveshwar, ‘The moon in his pocket’. Sometimes he wondered why ‘The squirrel is eating the sun on the tree-top’. He soon dropped the indirect approach. Chromatic character of astrological signs and abstraction were left behind. He could clearly see ‘The night descending slowly on us, crawling like an ant’.

Pramod developed a hold on figuration. He is now whole-hog into recognisable elements. He found a haven in the direct simplicity of Malwa miniatures, which is his speciality. Visuals if life and nature, with all their complexity, captivate him. He is totally devoted to life and nature images. An honest person can not turn his back on life. He grapples with the complexity around him, the mundane as well as the disturbing pictorial elements of extreme significance. It is not a close and shut attitude and has immense possibilities for exploration.

The engraved linear drawing on the point-coated canvas is the beginning. The canvas experiences a presence. Then suddenly a burst of chroma occurs and patches of colour begin to appear. The canvas is activated with brilliant hues. The engraved line participates with various forms appearing in quick succession. A drama of color unfolds and engulfs the canvas. At first there it is chaos. Then some magic procedure brings in new light to the canvas. Chaos gives way to organization. Attachment to brilliant hues starts functioning hand in hand with the engraved drawing. A small area gets activated….images become functional.

Birds come and fly. The old wall clock chimes. White swing into the richly coloured spaces. Chrome yellow expands and occupies a large chunk of the pictures area. Flat application throbs. A lot of simple activity gets synchronized into a composition of beauty. The static and the kinetic intermingle.

As curator of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Pramod has organized three museums. He has traveled extensively in India and abroad. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, he keeps his eyes open and his creativity alive. As a critic, Pramod has written about Indian Miniatures and interviews major Indian contemporary artists to probe their work and mind.
His experience in abstraction comes handy in his figurative poetry.

Umesh Verma
(Art Critic & Artist)

Mind

Mind can reason,can think,but it has limitation. So the moment mind encounters the unlimited,the infinite,dificulties arise,because mind itself is a limitetion. Mind has window to look at the sky,but then the window is imposed on the sky,and the sky is cut by the window. Then whatsoever you look at from the window is not the infinite sky,it is windowed sky,a patterned sky. The same thing happens with the mind.

Mind is a window to look at the world,mind is pattern to look through. When you look from the mind,the whole universe is distorted. You give your pattern to the universe.You look at the nuniverse with an attitude, with thought-system,with a reason, with a logic, with a method.

If you really are interested to know the world as it is,to know existence as it is, then throw away this mind totally.

Individual projection

As we live,as we are, it is a deep hypnosis. Whatesoever we feel, whatsoever we think, is based on hypnotic projections . In some face I see beauty, that beauty doesn't belong to the face,because someone else may not feel it as beautiful at all.It belongs to my projection. When I say some face is beautiful, I am projecting something from me,and the face is just a screen,because someone else may see the face as ugly.

You can project whatsoever you have in your mind, onto anything.That's why philosophers have been trying to define what beauty is,but they have never been able.It cannot be defined, not because it is something indefinable,but because it is an individual projection.

The phenomenon of projection is basic to our minds.We live not in the objective world,but in projected world.Once you being to understand this,the world phenomenon changes. So there is not one world,but there are as many worlds as there are minds. Everyone is living in his own individual world- multi- worlds, multi- universes.

The reality

The reality is unknown, the reality is unnamed. The reality is, but indefinable.It is, it is felt. We are part of it,we encounter it everywhere. Wheresoever you move, you move in reality,you lived every moment in it, you participat in it every moment.It is not something different from you, you are not something different from it, but still you can not named it, you cannot pinpoint it, you cnanot give it a label. What is it ?