An Article on Subodh Kerkar
Swatee

“Does the beach enjoy a sunset?  Does the sand remember?  These memories of sunset on sand remain very special for me.  Ethereal.  I wanted to paint the ‘moment’. – Subodh Kerkar.

How does an artist paint these brief moments when day swings over into night.  How does he ‘fix’ an instant and rivet shifting, shafts of sunlight on sand.  To record when such riches of nature are revealed to him without yielding to the facile.  To adhere to the demands of art, which is static, therefore the language of timelessness.  As Albert Camus, grappling in the writers craft observes, “to submit the ‘play of sun and sea’ to the superior demands of art, without denying their memory or altering their enchantment – what more thankless struggle!”

However, Subodh Kerkar can be thankful – despite the dictates of his artistic means, he has been amply rewarded for his efforts.  Paring and honing his craft with discretion, he evokes the particularities of time and place.  He eliminates the picturesque and rather than accumulating precise detail, he animates his tableaux by giving them the imprint of a quite internal movement. 

Russet – Gold horizontal stripes on a field of ink black, a vertical band of fire cutting through the centre.  Like blood filled venation of a leaf or an insects’ wing, the canvas is aglow with a molten light.  Recalling the subtle ‘moment’ Subodh has been able to freeze the sensuous, and the ephemeral – memory of sunset on sand. 
The sand will not forget.

Subodh was born and has lived with the delights of the sea.  His sensibility was formed by a seaside childhood and his vocation as a painter was shaped here in its Geography.  As a boy he walked along the shore looking for diamonds.  The sea was his treasure trove.  Today, throwing himself into the waves, it is as if he has received ‘veritable baptism’ which purifies him, and his works begin under the aegis of that multitude of waves.  Central to the mythology and culture of the Mediterranean is the imagery of the deep blue sea.  Camus professed “I grew up in the sea and the poverty was sumptuous, them I am lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable”.  These sentiments represents a dictum shared by a whole genre of writers, poets, painters and thinkers nourished on the sea and sky.  The liturgy of the ‘Mediterranean religion’.  As a painter of the ‘sea’ Subodh belongs to the same ilk.  His preoccupation is on the same scale as those who believe, the ‘sea’ is content to give but does so profusely.  “Everything here is revealed to the naked eye, and is known the very moment it is enjoyed.  Its pleasures have no remedies and its joys remain without hope.

The paintings have emerged from decidedly literal representation of narrative themes, and developed a language loaded with movement, discovery, migration and navigation.  From the early works of Goan houses, fishermen and boats Subodh has moved on to the edge of abstraction to communicate the ideas which inform his oeuvre.  He has abandoned the bright colors of the more representational for the darkly abstract.  Gray/black, predominantly a middle-range.  The method of working in the recent paintings – breaking down the literal source into a series of abstractions with their severe minimalist patterns as in the stripe paintings and slate blues and olives with faint markings suggesting imprint of tides and the grain of salt.  The composition in burnt sienna with flickering orange evokes a bird’s eye view of paddy fields set on fire after harvest.  The dying embers flaring momentarily – lit by the last light of the sun.  An impression Subodh carries from the aircraft as it was landing at Bangalore.  The carefully built up surface comes across as an unifying factor, the texture that refers to its source – the weather teak and rusted bolts of battered marine structures and old fishing crafts.  Like a carpenter moulding a piece of wood, abstracting his images with a sander, instilling gloss, depth, liberating the image of its veneer to seize the essence. 

Although nature is the source of his work, Subodh does not feel the compulsion to decode nature and reduce his forms to antiseptic, geometric constructions common to symbol dependent abstractionist art.  Veering away from clinical, structural purity, he infuses the bodily corporal presence into his works.  Rather than a rigorous semiotic approach they are an intuitive language that can extend to metaphor.  He uses his pictorial grammar to quest after a more metaphorical and metaphysical sense of place and journey. 

Subodh’s genial manner and his ‘trademark boyish grin’ belie a restlessness, as evident from the fact that both in life and work he has a constant need to explore and search new avenues and materials.  At an early age he learnt to paint under the guidance of his father, a teacher and an eminent painter.  He studied medicine, set up a successful practice, and after 5 years abandoned it.  He also worked as a cartoonist with a leading daily.  Despite the recognition this too could not contain him.  Perhaps he always knew his moorings lay elsewhere.  Thereafter he decided to paint professionally.

Initially Subodh worked extensively both in oil and watercolor.  As mentioned earlier he painted a variety of subjects – landscapes, people, animals, boats, architectural studies in an academic style.  The one feature common to all his works was the element of ‘light’.  “I actually painted things with light, most people only noticed the shade.”  However, contrary to what Subodh may say, reminiscences of his early works is always about the distinct quality of ‘light’.  A close observer, was quite nostalgic – for the ‘light’ he felt was missing from his recent paintings.  Personally for me the ‘light’ has grown even stronger.  It pervades everything he does, although its nature is singularly understated.  “Here too one is reminded of Subodh’s kingship with artists who lived off: the sea visible from every corner and a certain weight of sunlight.”  And those who believe “  There is a light behind us, and that we must turn round and cast off our chains if we are to look at it directly, and our task is before we die, to seek for all the works we can to name it”.

An indefatigable and prolific worker, Subodh says, “When people ask me how I manage with only 24 hours in a day – I tell them, I think faster than time”.  He goes on to recite Tagore his favourite poet, “when death knocks on my door, And tells me your time has come I shall tell death, I do not live in time, I live in love.  And when he asks me will your song last forever – I tell me I do not know, But when I sang them I felt eternity”.  Recalling the day he had gone to Siolim to fetch an old boat, Subodh explains how he had conceptualized and completed the installation with the boat by the time he reached his studio.  The only thing left was the physical act of production.  This accounts for the pace at which Subodh works.  Every time one visits his gallery, one is astound to see a new painting, sculpture, installation or an object.  The works are more or less finalized in his head he only needs to execute them.  Yet the effect is not one of detachment.  The process, the activity itself, always emphasizes his intent. 

In search of ways to express, Subodh added terracotta to his repository of materials.  He has created a range of forms – simple jars, Ganeshas, mask-heads to what resemble runes and tablets, divinatory symbols with magic or mysterious significance.  Even a casual visitor to Goa will notice the large terracotta sculptures that mark the city.  And, when lit at night, these primordial forms shine like beacons across the sea – making known the other shore and the dark hillside.

In 2002 Subodh encountered Andy Goldsworthy and his installation art.  An event, that has been decisive in his perception and defining his work.  Andy Goldsworthy, a Scotsman is a landscape installation artist who lives in the mountains.  He rises before dawn – to work with bare hands (gloves do not emit sensation) painstakingly building with pieces of ice a huge monumental structure.  It looks like a glass palace.  And then, he wakes for the sun to come up.  Watching with an intense sense of possession as the first rays illuminate his work.  Sparkling like diamonds, it slowly begins to melt – his ice palace. 

Only children know the joy of building castles in the sand.

Given his appetite for work, need for change, a propensity to take his chances, and a sensibility in tune with the ‘ephemeral’ transitory nature of things – Andy Goldsworthy held an immediate appeal for Subodh. 

This marks the beginning of a new phase in his artistic career.  Based on his inventory of images drawn from the sea, installation as a medium and technique enables his to enact his visual obsessions.  It open up the domain of art for the inhabitation of physical object, including text, poetry, photography, film, theatre, sound and light in articulated and structured space.  The artist became the creator of an environment.  This integration of diverse skills, media and materials suite the multi-dimensional needs of the contemporary artist.  To create a contemporary experience, installation is site-specific.  Sometimes the gallery space is used directly but for Subodh the beach often becomes the obvious choice. 

In his statement ‘Frontiers’ my installations – an art park as part of IFFI, Subodh says “Frontiers is a creation of my work in symbiosis with nature …… images are often stronger than reality.  Viewers are welcome, e.g., to observe plastic bags lying on the beach in my ‘Mirrors’ and reflect upon them”. 

An artist’s works can be viewed in terms of his vision.  I usually mistrust this approach because it easily ends up as a psychological study of the person and avoids important questions which should be asked of the work.  Does the work answer its own questions?  Does it redefine the viewer’s approach to art and his surroundings?

With Subodh there is no problem.  His process becomes the work and the viewer is compelled to approach the work in the same manner, spending time surrounded by, allowing forms to redefine their space.  Once Subodh finds a site he takes his time to understand, experience, and participate in his environment.  He then translates his awareness, his language, into drawings and sculpture.  His work involves openness and acceptance of the impermanence of his surroundings.  Rain may at any moment destroy what he has made.  He does not manipulate or merely observes nature, he wants to make a positive human statement within and become a part of it to create a piece which is one with his community.  The installation at Bombay – Chowpathy created with chappals and shoes washed ashore is a homage to thousands of Tsunami victims all over the world.   “Each chappal had a story to tell.  It spoke of the person who once used it.”  Now as installation, the space felt, becomes a community reality. 

Although Subodh eschews the role of an activist artist, he makes use of everything his experience as a politically committed man has taught him.  Quoting the example of Sant Tukaram the eminent Bhakti poet, Subodh says that although wrote his verses Five Hundred years back they are relevant even today and powerful in their imagery to reach a cross section of people.  His installation for a cotton factory at Sangli set against an agricultural backdrop is made up of ‘wadi’ and ‘sheni’.  Farming, organic metaphor.  Subodh says he would like to take contemporary art to the common man “Information, knowledge, wisdom, does not belong to a select few: they belong to everybody in the world and should be available accessing as such – it is because we have shared that we have grown.”

In his Kerala series Subodh has painted goddesses with blazing blood-shot eyes and long pink tongues, redolent of dark powers of myths and magic.  The 14 feet tall wooden sculpture with nails driven down the centre and the ritualistic markings he says is inspired by the Dravidian cult of worshiping the ‘Gramdevatas’.  The ‘Gramdevata’ is usually a goddess who is the ruling deity of the particular village.  She is associated with fertility, a nail is driven through her to ward off the evil eye.  Subodh manages throughout to maintain a fine balance between the formal, and direct freshness of human experience.  The rural and the urban. 

On entering his home one is startled by tiny red bulbs flickering crazily on their circuit around an arrangement of photographs of Hindu gods and goddesses including one of Dr. Ambedkar, a national leader recognized for the betterment of the under-privileged.  Typical of something you see behind a cash counter in a local hotel or a barber shop, utterly provincial.  Indian gods and goddesses have become the flavour – a fashion statement.  They adorn everything from chests to vests.  Similarly his ‘Rock & Roll’, a simple rocking stand assembled with metal,  stone and a toilet roll, interesting in its sense of superficiality of our urban lives, a new, very modern metaphor which is pretty much tongue – in- cheek in its suggestiveness.  One can see Subodh’s affinity for the wry, the playful combined with a respect for more dramatically rigorous work with clean, straight edges.  The elegance of a long slender boat mounted on a slim platform reminds one of a papyri form boat, a vessel evolved over centuries from Egypt’s most ancient craft: papyrus river rafts notable for its narrow beam and its high elegantly tapered stem – and stern – posts.  A sacred funerary bark for use by the dead pharaoh in the hereafter to join the sun god Re-Atum in his eternal journey across the sky.  Built on the same lines, yet carrying a total different ethos, his boats with ‘glass’ look like hi-tech space crafts.  Shimmering like glow-worms.  Green, glacial on a voyage to another planet.  Subodh’s journey with the elliptical form in their repeated incarnations – the works are saturated with a poetic and condensatory dense intensity.

Subodh once said, “My dreams are my sketch book.”  Poetic, often inscrutable, dreams have long been a source of artistic inspiration.  Jasper Johns’ first flag painting came to him in a dream.  William Blake once dreamt his brother taught him a method of engraving and awoke to discover it worked.  Some draw imagery from dreams, others use them as incubators for new ideas, and few even receive instructions in their sleep.  Instead of trying to prod them into comprehensibility, their inherent beauty lies in their stubborn subjectivity.  “A great work of art”, said Carl Jung, “Is like a dream.  For all its apparent obviousness, it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal”.  Artists sometimes don’t know where they get their material, however Subodh is certain his dreams are an important source. 

A beachcomber, he salvages whatever the sea offers.  Objects both manufactured and organic become raw material in the conceptualization of his work.  Discarding ambiguity in favour of a ‘single gestalt’ or the unique identity of the object itself, Subodh’s art balances subjectivity with that longing for objectivity – as a stretching of the inner self-indulgence toward the outside; his work shows the strain of pursuing the unattainable ‘objective’ without which it would have far less energy.  The sheer density of Subodh’s confrontation with the material of his life and art has invested his work with an aesthetic force.  And his intense individualism bore him through a great deal of personal weather, while at the same time it resisted a permanent artistic mooring. 

Thom Gunn in his poem ‘On the move’ has written,
“At worst, one is in motion, and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.”

Being ‘still’, is the last thing any one can accuse Subodh of – constantly working, experimenting, renewing himself, in his way of life.

BOATS

Working with old fishing crafts and translating them into a contemporary idiom, Subodh in a way has salvaged a heritage.  A way of life – a tribute to the old fisherman and his beautiful hand-crafted wooden boat, the coir used to hold it together forming patterns like alphabets from some ancient language now extinct.  In this age of fibre glass Subodh has in a way created a museum for these lost boats giving them a permanent place, to be viewed for posterity.  Deftly mixing archeology with cultural interpretation in the context of contemporary art.  In the recent works Subodh has incorporated glass, copper, etching with his wooden boats at all times maintaining the intrinsic form and character, and ensuring that its essence remains intact this being also important to his process.