GR Iranna

You come from a farmer's family and you have used a lot of agrarian symbols in your work. How has your childhood in a farmer's family reflected in your art?
I come from Bijapur, Karnataka. As you mentioned my father is a farmer. As a child, I would do farming and I consider myself a son of the soil. In a lot of the work I did in 1998, I have used several symbols of the farming community. In fact, I...

You come from a farmer's family and you have used a lot of agrarian symbols in your work. How has your childhood in a farmer's family reflected in your art?
I come from Bijapur, Karnataka. As you mentioned my father is a farmer. As a child, I would do farming and I consider myself a son of the soil. In a lot of the work I did in 1998, I have used several symbols of the farming community. In fact, I did a series of work which had farmers and farming as the central motif. As a child, I also studied in a Gurukul (a system of education where the student resides with the teacher). I lived in an ashram for almost seven years, which itself was a big influence. I learnt to understand my roots, my ancestors, and used a lot of that understanding in my paintings. It wasn't easy though it was quite a struggle.

Why?
Because my family didn't understand my leaning towards art. My father had ambitions like any father, of seeing his son be an engineer or a doctor. But by 1987 I had taken my decision, and went in for art education, first in Gulbarga, Karnataka, and then in Delhi College of Art. Delhi was much better. It offered me exposure to several international exhibitions and artists. But even here, I found that amidst the urban social fabric, the old and new values stood in sharp disparity.

You began by painting oil on canvas. But now you use several different mediums.
Yes, in the last five or six years I have moved to tarpaulin, and I think I am the only artist in India to do that. It suits me very well as a medium. I like my paintings to reflect strength, to reflect energy, and tarpaulin is an extremely strong medium. I have also used rubber solution on canvas.

What is the process of creating a painting or a piece of art for you?
I begin with a blank canvas and a blank mind. I don't decide what I am going to paint. If you know what you are going to create, there is no creativity. A child never knows what he is going to do next, and he is the most creative.
I start with a blank canvas and mind, and then begin playing with the canvas, have a dialogue with it. Stories and images emerge out of that dialogue.

What have been the influences on your work?
I draw my major influence from the several exhibitions that Delhi allows me to see. Sometimes, some ideas get lodged in my mind, sometimes, new techniques. But I don't deliberately go out of my way to translate those experiences onto canvas. It comes through itself. I don't have to do it consciously.

What is your major preoccupation as an artist?
The antithetical structure of the world intrigues me, simply because of the inherent dualities that govern life. Although it is rather difficult to comprehend why, if life is movement, one seeks stillness, if a journey, one seeks destination and if transient, one desire permanence. It is as if we are trying to negotiate between the body and the mind, surface and depth, the past and present.

Your work is overwhelmingly abstract. What attracts you to abstract concepts?
I think Buddhism influences me in a way. I have read a lot of Buddhist philosophy; I have studied art in Ajanta and Ellora. My painting, Ananda, is influenced by Buddhist philosophy. You will see there is no figure in that work, it is all abstract. Ananda means joy, which is an abstract concept that has no figure or form.
I did lot of paintings influenced by Buddhist thought between 1995 to 1998.

In some of your works you have depicted a lot of Indian motifs in foreign settings. Like the Queen wearing beautiful Indian jewellery on her birthday. What was the thought behind this series?
It was a result of my visit to Europe in 1999-2000. I realized that the best of Indian culture and heritage--- its jewellery, including Kohinoor, its art, its antiques ---- are all in London. Despite it being ours, we had no control over it. That's when I painted this series. I showed the Queen celebrating her birthday wearing Indian jewellery, even as she stepped on and Indian's head. She also wore a bindi. It was a very controversial painting, and created a lot of furor in London.
Then there was the painting that had Nandi, Lord Shiva's mount, celebrating Diwali in a British museum. It makes a very strong statement against the Colonial Raj.
After visiting the museums and archives abroad, and seeing so much of Indian work there, I felt proud of my origin. I realized that most of the beautiful things exhibited at these museums are the ones they took away from India.

What are you working on now?
I am attempting to translate my internal landscape, or mindscape, onto canvas. I have just begun painting these, so there isn't much I can tell you about it. The thought process will evolve as the work goes on.