Samir Mondal

Self-titled "Watercolor Man" Samir Mondal explains that he owes his passion for art to three factors. "First, I was born near a river, a riverbank. Second, I was born in a rural village far from civilization, in the depths of a jungle" he says, stating that he did not see an automobile until the age of twelve. Household goods would be purchased from the boats that would occasionally pass his village. In these surroundings, his...

Self-titled "Watercolor Man" Samir Mondal explains that he owes his passion for art to three factors. "First, I was born near a river, a riverbank. Second, I was born in a rural village far from civilization, in the depths of a jungle" he says, stating that he did not see an automobile until the age of twelve. Household goods would be purchased from the boats that would occasionally pass his village. In these surroundings, his childhood play was simple. "I would sing, I would shout. I could not think of playing with electrical objects, or imagine being a pilot. I would run, climb trees: That is my line to art." Finally, Mondal offers thanks that he was born to an "as poor as poor family. Anyone with nothing should feel lucky" because he can discover things from scratch. "Those born in the first-world lose the opportunity" to touch and feel, see and discover everything. "Creativity is a necessity," he states. "To experiment with raw materials, to arrange things to get a pleasing result, is pure art." In a society that lacked prefabricated toys, Mondal describes the experience of making his own playthings. His father, a schoolteacher, was sent complimentary copies of a news bulletin called the American Reporter. The pages of this periodical were cut out and made into kites, or used as sketch paper by Mondal and his friends. His early paintings were done with improvised paints: greens from the juice of leaves, reds found in the mendhi borrowed from their mothers, blacks and blues from fountain-pen ink. Sculptures would be created with clay or mud.

His early influences in art were simple. "My mother would sing a song, to make us sleep or for our pleasure. My father had good handwriting," and from his parents he learned how the world could be made beautiful by attending to it. "By climbing trees, by swimming in the river, I gained direct knowledge of trees, the shapes of the leaves, the texture of the tree-trunk." Even to a painter, the tactile details of objects are as important as the visual details. He quotes the advice of a teacher, who instructed "Go out in the sun for fifteen minutes, then paint sunlight in a landscape," because one needs to get the sunlight in his body.

Around the age of twelve, Mondal and his family moved to a larger town. There, Mondal found that many of the neighboring children were creatively inclined, involved in painting, acting, singing and writing poetry. During this time, India was at war with China, and Mondal found that when he joined in the sport of his neighbors, it was a military idiom by which they played. The war provided elements, materials, variations: As Mondal commented, "Art comes when you have enough material to paint with." News from the front, coupled with a heady mix of fear and excitement, fed the imagination. "There were lots of planes in the air, people were curious, adults were mysterious, and people then told many stories." In their games, they would create miniature warfields with weapons made from clay. The children would draw soldiers, then cut them out and paste them onto cardboard. "Our understanding then came through stories, through our elders, newspapers and radios", that told what was going on without showing it. Thus, the visual details had to be imagined.

His peers helped Mondal to progress as an artist. He describes a friendly sense of competition that emerged between the neighboring children. "First, I did portraits. Then I saw a boy drawing a dog's head, so I tried to draw a dog's head. This was more difficult than a human face." The physical materials continued to be culled from the natural world: The children would create black color by holding a metal plate to a flame, and they made their paint brushes from bamboo pieces. Ideas were constantly being exchanged and improved.

While living in this more cosmopolitan atmosphere, Mondal came into contact with an art teacher who held a degree from an art college, and thus realized that such institutions exist. Under his tutelage, Mondal's work began to mature and deepen. He describes his teacher's corrections to his drawings as similar to "a teacher's handwriting in the margins of a schoolboy's essay. The handwriting always looks like a teacher's handwriting," and so it was with the drawing corrections. Mondal tried to imitate the assurance found in his teacher's use of line and shading.

By chance, Mondal happened on a prospectus for the art college where his teacher had gone. "The title following my art teacher's name was so long!" recalls Mondal: "Diploma Holder from the Government College of Arts and Craft in Calcutta," as compared to the other instructors who were listed as M.A.s or Ph.Ds. His teacher's influence, combined with his mother's support, encouraged Mondal to enroll at the Government College of Arts and Craft in Kolkata, despite the cost of the course. Once in college, Mondal began taking on a range of odd jobs to earn money: greeting card design, painting toys, weaving wall hangings, illustrating books, designing theater sets, making animation films, miming, and dancing. "The need to earn money made me explore these fields," and he found the knowledge gained from his varied work enhanced his skill as a painter.

"Watercolor to me is a very homey medium. I am familiar with it from my childhood: plant juices, inks, all my early materials were water-soluble." He appreciated how watercolors allowed him to evoke atmospheres in nature, of sunlight, cold water, or tree bark. "Watercolor is not a lazy medium like oils, pastels, or acrylics. Those are push-pull mediums, where you can move colors around on the canvas." By contrast, "water-colors immediately merge," in ways that can enhance or destroy the artist's painting. "I love the naughtiness of water-color, its activity, and liveness."

He likens painting with watercolors to playing chess. "The pigment is playing with you," and one must remain a step ahead of his opponent." "Vocabularies are made through the process of water-coloring. It is never a boring thing, but always rich with variations. Water creates a thousand gradations". He likens watercoloring to Vedic usic: "Colors are given names as are notes in music. There is 'green', but how much blue, how much yellow? Is it a bluish-green or a yellowish-green?" As Vedic music includes the sounds between the notes, so does watercolor attend to subtle distinctions.

"I think India is not good for oil, climate-wise. Oils themselves were brought by the British. Before that, Indian art is all done using water-based colors," he says, naming the Ajanta Caves, manuscripts, court paintings, and other forms of art. For influences, Mondal first names nature. After that, he mentions Gopal Ghosh, "brilliant at watercolor." His instruction provided an antidote to the British influence of oils. "Watercolor was fascinating in Calcutta. One must always first study nature. Bengal ranges from the Himalayas to the ocean."

"I say very strongly, I cannot do other mediums," says Mondal. "Watercolor suits my temperament."

Mondal describes the twentieth century as an era of "'isms': Impressionism, Expressionism, Modernism, Cubism, Dadaism. Artists looked to Paris, the art capital then, a mecca to painters. But the painters there all used oils as a medium. Experimentation has not happened in the field of watercolor." As a contemporary man who loved watercolors, Mondal found himself searching for a personal style. He explored fellow watercolorists in Kolkata, throughout India and abroad to discover how they used watercolor? "But people then were crazy about oils," and oil painters had a wealth of resources unavailable to the watercolorist. "There were big big, good good books on all these 'isms'." Mondal asked himself "How far can I go with watercolor? Can I match myself with the contemporary art movement?" In contrast to his early days of friendly one-upsmanship in painting, Mondal found himself essentially without peers. "In India, watercolor was stuck in landscapes."

Eventually, Mondal turned to oil paintings for inspiration, recasting their forms and structures within the medium of watercolor. "I studied the visual qualities that were dominating the art world, asked myself 'What is the meaning of the modern color combinations. I studied this to be modern, to catch the modern man." His chief influences were Matisse, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. From Matisse, Mondal discovered the strong effects of a dramatic and unconventional palette. Mondal describes him as "the guru of Fauve," and it is the wildness of Matisse's Fauve-era paintings that Mondal found compelling. "His combinations of Cezanne pointed up the ways to achieve a structural quality in paintings that Mondal felt to be missing from the field of watercolor. "The watercolors of Chinese and Japanese artists are weightless. Watercolors generally are flat, light, and floating with no structure." He names Cezanne as the artist who "solved the problem of structure through his placement of lighter and darker colors and his manipulation of pictorial space. For van Gogh, Mondal feels a more personal debt: "I was struck by the similarity of my childhood and his, his immediate relationship to the world, his use of forms and colors from nature."

Inspired by these recent masters, Mondal sought to apply oil techniques to watercolor, adopting the vibrant colors, structure, "weight", and large size characteristic of the medium. "I borrowed the thrust and dynamism of oils," he says, adding "I wanted to be with them, demanding the same prestige" commanded by large-scale works in oils.

About his current work, Mondal explains that his vocabulary has changed. He has become interested by the "Impressionists' anti-art movement of present time," and has begun burning, cutting, tearing, and otherwise 'defacing' his canvases. "A fury is always present," he says. He explains that "it is very difficult to be Indian now. Ten years back, Indians were 'in'. You were encouraged to be ethnically conscious in your art, prompted to be self-aware of your ethnicity. Now we are in an era of globalization, however, which has mixed French, Polish, Chinese clothes, food, whatever. We forget what is ours and what is other."