Akbar Padamsee

Akbar Padamsee: “Our greatest strength is our chaos!”

Akbar Padamsee's oeuvre straddles the world of paints and canvas as well as that of photography and digital art. He held his first digital art show in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai in January 2000. Widely regarded in Indian art circles as a formal and even conservative painter, this shift to computer art surprised everyone. His oils have been...

Akbar Padamsee: “Our greatest strength is our chaos!”

Akbar Padamsee's oeuvre straddles the world of paints and canvas as well as that of photography and digital art. He held his first digital art show in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai in January 2000. Widely regarded in Indian art circles as a formal and even conservative painter, this shift to computer art surprised everyone. His oils have been characterised by an incandescent gravity, his drawings by an austere grace. A member of the first generation of post-colonial Indian artists, which sought cosmopolitan freedom in Paris and London during the 1950s and 1960s, he is seen to have developed his images within the genres of portraiture and landscape as refracted through the prism of high modernism.

In this 2000 interview, Akbar Padamsee talks to Rini Shah about his new found love for computer graphics and his art:

Q. How did you begin work on the new virtual images?
I began using computers as a medium some two years ago. In the beginning I simply scanned my paintings or tried to paint using the mouse. There is a digitally filtered evenness to everything you do on the computer. I tried to balance that with the tonal and texture variations of my art.Most Indian artists working with digital art in India are just reproducing their works on computer. What I tried to do was explore geometrical forms.

Q.You painted them with a mouse?
No for these I did not use the mouse. All the forms were based on the mathematical equations that I had fed into the computer. I wanted to explore the new technology and not just reproduce the old.

Q. How did you manage this transition from using your hand to paint to using technology? Didn’t you find that odd?
No because when I use the computer I am not drawing the image, but I am employing other artistic principles. Skill is important but being an artist is not just about having technical virtuosity. For instance the computer allowed me to make only very small images. So I thought of ways to extend the space. And when I looked at the Indian miniatures I found the answer. They were masters in space extension. Another thing I learnt from them was to increase the accent on the colors. I prefer more muted colors in my oil paintings, but on the small surface I increased the intensity. I used the gradation of colors to crate tonal variations.

Q. Aren’t you scared that the concept of the original will die with computer art? You can make so many reproductions using a computer?
I think we should throw concepts like originals out of the window. It leads to elitism of art. Films and music are mass-produced but they never create a problem.

Q. How do you recall your art school days in Mumbai?
My most favourite model in Sir J. J. school of art school used to be Venus de Milo. In many ways studying in JJ was like studying in a museum. My art teacher thought that reading in the library was a waste of time compared to totally devoting yourself to studio work. We were left alone to discover our individual styles.

Q. Your other major obsession has been human figures. What fascinates you about them?
I guess I was born with an eye for images. At the age of five, I so admired the colorful Raja Ravi Varma prints that hung in my ayah’s room that I borrowed one for my bedroom. I believe that one must be chosen for art and not choose it as just another option. I have always loved the human form. The human form in motion is exciting and sometimes when my models allow me to film them using my video camera, I shoot them in movement and later freeze and image and sketch it out.

Q. Will you ever work with installation art, which is so popular these days?
No it doesn’t interest me much. Ten years ago, it was narrative painting. Now, everybody’s doing installations and no one’s doing it out of any deep conviction. Art is imitating fashion these days. Like fashion pundits predict blue will be in this season or mini skirts will be out, something of that sort has crept into art. In India we had escaped this copying syndrome. Everyone was different but not any more.

Q. What do you think has changed since the time the Progressive Artist Group worked in the 50s and 60s?
Our great strength is our chaos. We have the power of disorder and in the midst of this, we can make great discoveries. But we are giving this up by adopting a superficial order system of the West. Instead we should discover our own path and a thousand flowers would bloom.