Taking art to the masses

Creative corner

The bearded intense features of artist Vasudeo Kamath belie his ever-conciliatory nature and his down-to-earth persona. Known as one of the foremost portrait artists of our time, he has had none other than the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee and former president Pratibha Devisingh Patil as his subjects.

But it is not the high and mighty alone that he likes to depict with a lifelike, yet personal touch. He engages in conversations with his subjects in two-hour sessions in order to capture the moment of truth on their visages. “I spent two hours talking to the then president Pratibha Patil, while I filled in the colours of the painting. This makes the subject feel relaxed,” he surmises. In a more personal involvement, he narrates how he had set about doing a portrait of a friend of his, and wanted to capture his signature smile on his artwork. Realising that keeping a pasty smile on the face would prove ineffective, he had asked his nephew to tell jokes to his subject while he painted, and the result is there for all to see.

But memorable among his cache of portrait moments was when he decided to compete for the prestigious Draper Grand Award of the Portrait Society of America. Realising the prohibitive rate of a sit-in session with a live model, he had almost given up on the contest, when his wife, who was accompanying him, offered to model for him. And in her comfortable matronly style, seated on an armchair, she had steered the course to victory for her husband, who now quips about the incident saying: “Behind every successful artist, there is a portrait of his wife.”

Visually speaking

Being a versatile creator, Vasudeo Kamath has not kept himself confined to the portraiture genre alone. Being an outgoing artist who is committed to taking his art to the common masses, and not through elite exhibitions in galleries alone, he is a strong propagator of landscape painting in-situ. Thus, he often sets out on landscape painting tours, camps his equipment in the open countryside, and surrounded by the curious eyes of the locals, he begins to reproduce views into a visual language that becomes interconnected with his bystander audience.

“It is an artist’s duty,” he envisages, “to speak on his art and exhibit it. That is why I even attract an audience into my work, and their queries and observations about my work are stimulating to say the least.” Thus, Kamath is of the school that still braves the icy chill of a Ladakhi plateau, and strikes up conversations with itinerant lamas, as he continues to paint the surroundings of the mountains in Leh, and considers it as a moment of rare opportunity when a gap appears in the clouds, allowing him a sneak peek at some craggy snow-covered hilltop.

Teaching art

Being an artist who engages with his viewers on a man-to-man basis, Kamath is very much at home giving demonstrations of his painting techniques to students. These occasions are not just ‘cut and dry’ opportunities to stress the basics of making art, but also a platform of exchange on what plagues young art practitioners today.

“When I was holding a demonstration in Surat, I had advised students to build their own studio space as early in their careers as possible.” The students had asked if he was aware of the price of land in their city. He had tempered their ambitions to doable limits by stating that by putting up an easel in the corner of their sleeping spaces, they could make a studio, and by exhibiting in a humble studio for a start, instead of aiming for a booking at the Jehangir Art Gallery, these artists could achieve the goal of all artists: the opportunity to exhibit their art as often as they could.

Of late, this artist has even perfected the genre of conceptualised paintings taking on familiar episodes of the epics not as imaginary pictorialisations, but “to bring out a narration in them through their illustrative element.” The series on the saints of India is evidence of this concept.

With his individual approach to art, this artist has taken Indian art into a new realm, where the past is being revisited through a new prism of concepts, attitudes and associations.