Colours of consciousness

Art of the Matter

His dogs seem more human than animate, but like renounced souls, they watch the world through drooping lids without being moved by it. As for the boats that appear in his psychedelic canvases, they are always half-seen; they are seen from various perspectives, and most crucially, they appear in various stages of being built, broken or just rotting away.

Obviously, Pravin’s imagery holds more depth than their apparent face value. Creation and dissolution; detached perceptions, questioning pre-conceived mindsets… Pravin Kannanur’s colourful imagery is more than a dig at the conditioned visual perception of the eye. It quizzes your mind.  

Tranceport — this latest series of acrylic on canvas paintings by Pravin Kannanur is being showcased by Chennai-based cultural czar and textile tycoon Ranvir Shah’s India Collective, which has taken upon itself to promote the works of promising Indian artists and project them into the international art world.

“Today, there are galleries and galleries, and galleries have become like shops stocking too many stuff. We decided that at India Collective, we would just focus on four or five artists of international quality, ready to plunge into the top, but not yet fully ‘discovered’; we decided we will hand-hold them, promote and nurture them and place them on the international arena, where they rightfully deserve to be,” says Ranvir Shah.

As a cultural czar, Shah needs no introduction. He happens to be the founder of the Prakriti Foundation, famous for its cultural extravaganzas; he is also the curator of The New Festival that has been bringing world culture to the Indian stage for nine years now.

“India collective also works to make the audience more aware of art — of the influences that the art or artist has been impacted by, the history, the movement, etc — rather than being just art patrons,” Shah adds.  

Crows, dogs and boats

It is the flatly applied psychedelic colours on Pravin’s canvas that make the first impact on the viewer, although one doesn’t consciously perceive this. The intelligent denizens of the coastal world — the crow and the dog — hit you next.

This is inescapable, given that Pravin accords them a magnified size and a centre stage in the canvas, and most often, a direct perspective so that these creatures always look into your eyes, and perhaps into your mind. The boat, the crow and the dog become metaphors of the coastal city that is home to Pravin — Chennai. Well… isn’t that a minuscule identity for a city that encompasses so much?

“If somebody else had set out to bring to the canvas his perception of the city, he would have touched upon other things,” concedes Pravin. “Personally, I identify the city with its coastal activity because my father was a boat maker and, as a child, life revolved around the oceans for me,” he says. Tamil literature too lists out crows and dogs as icons of coastal land, and calls the coastal land ‘Neithal’, he informs.  

The boats in the canvas always seem to be emerging from the margins (sometimes from the top margin too), and keep changing their positions and states. Is this a comment on the intellectual process of opinion formation and perception, if the boat is to be decoded as a metaphor for the human mind?

Pravin has used photographic references for this series. Such as the injured crow ‘Gaanabandu’ that was adopted by his friend and versatile Tamil actor-director M Pasupathi, and that of the dog Narimugam, belonging to another friend Rashmi Devadasan. Then, of course, there are the photographs taken by Pravin himself, as he wandered through umpteen lazy boat yards.

The other consciousness

These images hit the senses and one’s consciousness because of the unadulterated consciousness these creatures themselves have been portrayed with, flashing intelligent perception through their expressive eyes. “We always equate consciousness to human consciousness. But life is much more pluralistic. Today, research has been unravelling so much about animal perceptions and consciousness; in fact, crows can make tools, apparently!” Pravin adds.

While Pravin has left the pigment application flat, he does work over it, using the palette knife to create currents or ‘rhythms’, as he calls it, which flow between the objects in the frame of the canvas.

“That was to give a sense of continuum, to underscore the fact that we don’t know where one event begins and ends,” he shares. The grids which are so created simulate perceptions of the space-time fabric, something physicists use to project the time-space continuum. Pravin has also got the colour dribbles to trail down the canvas by holding it up vertically, so as to let the pigment drops take their own paths. In other places — the boats in particular, he has done a great deal of detailing with a (point one) stipple brush.

These tiny linear markings create a mural effect in those specific areas. The myriad shades and tones of blue, green, violet and the other colours that Kannanur manages to lay, layer by layer, creates an impressive palette of colour, which must have taken ages to create.

As for Pravin’s personal trajectory, he had set out to learn zoology, but eventually took to art. He trained at the studio of the abstractionist, Bhagwan S Chavan, the effect of which can be seen in the brush work of Tranceport, where patches of colour and shade have gone on to build the three dimensional shape of some of his crows.

Besides art, Pravin Kannanur shares other fascinations; theatre is one of them. Pravin directed ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Caligula’ for Koothu-p-pattarai, the Chennai-based theatre group that has been trying to revive vernacular theatre.

Pravin later founded his own theatre group, Magic Lantern, and directed ‘Wings and Masks’ (contemporary dance), ‘Fables’, ‘Jeremy’, ‘Veshakkaran’, ‘Mashali Mohalla’ and ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ for Magic Lantern. He had earlier taken professional training in theatre sets, lights and videography at the Strasbourg School of Theatre, France. Puppetry is another passion Pravin holds. In fact, his foray into theatre started off with puppetry. Even now, Pravin conducts puppetry workshops about once a year at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre.  

Questioning perceptions

The fantastic colours of his imagery also question perceptions. “Once I was looking at a Gond painting by a tribal artist which had branches morphing into snakes. When I asked him why he had shown the trees to have snakes for branches, the artist stunned me by asking, “What snakes? These are pheasant birds, and they will be flying away soon,” chuckles Pravin.

Some of Pravin’s works take an even more direct but subtle dig at perception. Called ‘Preening’ and ‘Pretence’, these two small format works are actually not crows at all, but pigeons. But our eyes are by now so used to the imagery of crows, dogs and boats that we are ready to perceive the ‘crow’ even when we don’t see it! It is only when Pravin points this out that my eye reconfigured its perception.

Pravin’s works can be experienced at different levels. Visually, they excite the eye and stimulate your thought streams. Intellectually, they raise your awareness; emotionally, they underscore the bond between man and the simple facets of life that truly anchor him to his city.