One still remembers Champa Sharath's first solo exhibition a few years ago. With the directness and simplicity enabled by the traditional medium of woodcut and essential realism, she depicted what she knew best and what concerned her most - the life of girl students on the campus. Thanks to the large sizes of the prints, the uncomplicated sincerity of her representation gained, perhaps, naturally rather than by a consciously applied method, expressive authenticity. The authenticity of the reflected and internalised surroundings echoed the fairly conservative technique and form in their acquitting an unassumingly contemporary tone.

The same approach underlies now the young Bangalore artist's imagery based on a religious-mythological theme. Her vast array of expansive woodcuts at Sumukha (October 15 to 24) is dedicated to Hanuman as the hero of the Hanuman Chalisa from the "Ramcharitmanas" by Tulsidas.

   Starting on a note of innocent literalness and touching naivety, with all seriousness she illustrates important episodes from the epic accompanied by more or less iconic representations of the deity. The naïve and the obvious, besides presumably reflecting the artist's heart, link well with the emotions and the way of understanding Hanuman on the humble level among the masses of present-day believers. Whether this has occurred spontaneously or was calculated, the aesthetic borrowings from popular art serve here finely. The blend of realistic depiction and the old-fashioned awkwardness of calendar art, comics, school textbooks or match box pictures do bring out a sense of embodied current-time sensibilities that have inherited layers of a long lineage—only dated as well as archaic.

Amid the interesting formal connections, the viewer may locate one leading to early 20th century prints of Kolkata and elsewhere, as suggested by the more static and intricate of the black and white pieces. Intellectually and emotionally, Champa wishes to hold on to the mythical images as repositories of unquestioned values.

   The old-fashioned stylistic elements in her work should then enhance the need to anchor in their lasting character against the fleeting, relative present. The fact that Hanuman merges human and animal traits in the imagery of the divine as well as in his imperfection epitomises unshaken devotion to god, can make him a comfortable example to follow for a modern person. Champa indeed would like to see him as "Mirror of the Mind" of a pure kind. Throughout the pictures that show the monkey god valiantly battling demons, obeying Rama's orders faithfully and displaying his loyalty, there is a degree of modest or graceful normalcy and of the spectacular along with a tinge of the hieratic and sanctified by iconography. A number of portraits          stress the hero's humanity oscillating between the somewhat simplistic look of him as a baby and the moving awkwardness of Hanuman carrying a bunch of healing herbs. A striking composition is achieved in the episode of his killing a demonic serpent, also in the occasional ones that use the motif of black silhouettes—an old-fashioned device but evocative. Thus, the simplicity approach has its limitations as well as virtures.

Middling variety
The recent display by Kahawa organised at WelcomArt Gallery, Windsor Manor (October 11 to 14) offered an ample but rather middling range of works by often young local artists as well as living in other parts of the country. Pleasing decorativeness and variation on over-familiar styles were the prevailing traits in the exhibition which otherwise comprised of many unconnected idiomatic choices. Dated realistic sceneries coincided there with copies of traditional Mysore images, with second-hand expressionistic abstraction and a vague contemporariness that touched merely the formal surface of things while borrowing heavily from established and by now popular precedents. Among the comparatively more interesting contributions one could count those by Shrinidhi Sheshadri, Raghu Kondur, Raghu Wodeyar and Chitra Bharath.

Tactility
Manjunath Hannapura, a very young painter from Tumkur, does possess considerable technical skills which he uses with freedom and energy (CKP, October 12 to 17). This, however, serves merely for decorative purposes.
The abstracted images of scenery atmosphere or more design-oriented, but also abstract, compositions as "Ecstasy fro Communication" may be striving to evoke the tangibility of elusive but overwhelming sensations, as the artist indulges in an abundance of raised textures, linear reliefs and drippings. Such devices are, yet, employed towards unoriginal and quite easy, form-oriented effects.

He tries to incorporate contemporary elements, still the foundation remains indistinctly modernist with sporadic echoes of Laxman Shreshtha.

Design webs
A contemporary of the previous artist, Manjunath H. Lakshman of Gulbarga who studied at the CKP, may appear different in his canvases, while deep down exhibiting very similar sources and attitude (CKP, October 12 to 17). The soft, densely entangled but open meshes of strokes create patterns that let one think of city maps.
Whether looser and almost flowing under the water colour-like acrylic, raised over amorphous, thick textures or more defined and harder in straight hatchings and cut across by aggressive white diagonals, the paintings again seem patterned and fairly decorative, sometimes somewhat loud. The less flattering traits enhance in the mannerist drawings with human figures. One prefers the smaller paintings that subdue their colours and restrain-soften the design.

Amateurish
The "Corporate Art Exhibition on World Mythology & Corporate Myths" at Taj Residency (October 11 to 13) did not quite do justice to its grand title. Comprising of several paintings by self-taught Samij Datta, the show did refer to religious and cultural icons doing it, nevertheless, in a very simplistic, if enthusiastic, manner. Whether alluding to masters, like Jackson Pollock, or indulging in patchy, dynamic abstraction, the works are amateurish and over-confident, instead of at least revealing naïve or innovative sincerity, as one may have expected.