Roundabout | Singing colours splash on life’s empty canvas
One of the most exciting aspects of the show, put together with love and care, is the coming alive of the ‘kasturi’ of musk deer, which has often featured on his canvases, spreading fragrance in delightful decorative sculptures in fibreglass and metal
Meadows of Life-Scape at Government Museum is a spectacular display by Madan Lal, a young man who came from Talwandi Bhai, near Punjab’s Moga, to the Chandigarh College of Art in 1982 to realise his dreams of studying a discipline that was close to his heart. The road to this realisation was not an easy one and it meant hard work, exposure to new learning, nights awake on the terrace of the senior magical painter Raj Kumar and in the company of Sidharth the mendicant painter, story-teller Mohan Bhandari among others, listening to the night-long stories of Laali the ‘Sawant’ of Patiala. This was indeed the best artistic school of learning the arts outside the predictable and often stuffy and convoluted classrooms that our fledgling city of Chandigarh had to offer.
Indeed, Madan Lal has returned more than he got from the young city built by Corbusier. The past decade has seen him climb step by step to rise and shine as a painter whose versatility has seen him find recognition home and abroad and also seen his creations go up the fortune graph. Elaborating on his work, art historian Saroj Rani aptly says: “He is well-versed in the language of colours which speak out and play musical tunes in the hands of the artist.”
One of the most exciting aspects of the show, put together with love and care, is the coming alive of the ‘kasturi’ of musk deer, which has often featured on his canvases, spreading fragrance in delightful decorative sculptures in fibreglass and metal. This is yet another experiment of his favourite creatures coming out and welcoming the visitors in grace and elegance. It is indeed a surreal world that the painter offers the viewers with images taken from the world around him and recreated with love and sensuality. His is a heightened sense of beauty and he takes the viewers through it with an interesting metamorphosis of reality, transforming itself into a dream and vice versa. An interesting aspect of the dream seller who takes the viewer through make-believe and the mythical with ease as against the harsh reality of the day-to-day struggle is that his oeuvre includes a sudden shock of a kasturi sans ornamentation and the beautiful face replaced by a haunting skull in a journey from romance to reality.
An unparalleled journey of Ishwar Dayal
From the story of the Talwandi youth who came to the city to follow art, we now come to yet another young man with colours in his heart and dreams in his head who travelled all the way from Karnara, named after the Karana of Mahabharat fame, in the Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh, who came to the College of Art in the city in 1979, the last year of the sweet Seventies. He is none other than the well-regarded painter and printmaker Ishwar Dayal who not only studied in the college and stayed back as a faculty member of the college against all odds. Not only did he teach art to many as a lecturer in the college but continues to be a mentor of many aspiring artists as director of Artspace in the Industrial Area Phase-9, Mohali. His is, in fact, a remarkable contribution in setting up this centre along with Malkit Singh, a retired bureaucrat, extending art beyond the elite zones of the Art College to a rather remote area of the tricity and imparting mentorship and training to many enthusiasts who for one reason or the other could not be part of the city administration’s comfort zones for art and artists. It could rightly be called and ‘Unparalleled Journey’, which is also the title of his retrospective show at Artspace to mark his 70th year and celebrate his relationship with the city from 1979, when he joined the art college, to 2025, which finds him active as ever because age is just a number for him and due to his dedication to art as a practitioner and a teacher.
His contribution to print-making-graphics, a discipline that came with technology as against the age-old arts of painting and sculpture, has been immense. He has been the mentor to many young artists of the city who have expressed themselves creatively in this art which keeps pace with changing times. As for his own art, it has an earthy grace and the artist dares to experiment with form, technique and colour with an imprint all his own with paper rather than canvas being his preferred choice for its softness. To quote art critic Saroj Rani: “He is a modernist who developed an uncompromising non-visual language while drawing his inspiration from age-old Indian roots.” Although from a town named after Karna, the tragic hero of the Mahabharata epic, our artist here is a fighter for his rights and one congratulates him on turning 70 with the energy to contribute further in his chosen field.
nirudutt@gmail.com
