Manu Singh
Where I am…
All art and all creations, in any discipline, whether a painting, a sculpture, a picture or a graphic are independent identities. This can be further elucidated that when an artist sits in front of a blank canvas (in my case the blank screen of my PC), his mind, like his canvas, is also blank.
Like meditation it is a dialogue between one blankness with another. The nothingness addressing the myriad layers of nothingness within the artist and the shapes, the sounds, the colours, the flames, the angels and the demons all start waking up and they reverberate.
When I was growing, I saw, heard and imbibed a little more than the other children of my age. And today when I sit in front of my PC I am in fact trying to catch and snare my memories and all that which went into my making. Needless to say that I chose to be a graphic artist because I am physically challenged and cannot move about. So this challenge to exist, to somehow control certain realities eggs me continuously.
So far I have worked in my graphics with existing forms and form less entities and I am not very satisfied with my harvest. Now I am trying to go a little deeper into this challenging ocean without any tools or with VERY minimalist tools and shall delve deeper into colours. I actually wish to go beyond the established format which most of the graphic artists are using. I only want to work with basic colours and then add different elements in there in order to enrich my creations.
Till now my artistic process did not have many layers and I want a breakthrough wherein there is no cerebral activity nor attention, nor groping but a journey of simplicity going towards the heart bypassing the mind.
During this project/tenure, as I have already said I plan to work in such a way that colours imbued with elements will harmoniously co-exist and the visual will speak about no intervention of the tools of the craft. So far my journey has been to master the tools, to master the craft, to master the fusion and the synthesis of the colours and the forms. But now the tools will vanish, the craft will vanish and there will be a very eloquent soliloquey of colours.
Am I setting myself onto a path which, hitherto none has ventured so far? Even if the answer is no I am committed to do something that hasn't 'been' so far. How an artist is supposed to venture into alien shores without any tools? Chasing memories, giving them shapes only in colours? The most powerful example and visual I can give here is that of Michaelangelo during the period he was doing the Sestine Frescoes. The Pope had asked him to paint God Whom he hadn't even seen. And the rest is history. Humbly I say here I am neither being presumptuous or over-ambitious because I know that colours have a way of unfolding and throbbing and if one's receivers and antennaes are properly tuned, mesmerising and miraculous creations can always be fished.
Coming back to my work so far I have relied heavily on religio-classic and ecclesiastical imagery, mostly lying dormant in my mind with whom I am in a comfortable dialogue. But now it seems that my journey with that is coming to pass. May be that is because I have felt a very strong pull of doing 'simple' things which in fact have always been extremely challenging.
Hence the colours, hence a graphic made without any tools, interacting with elements. Its a challenge I have set myself up with so that I can set an examplary path for my other artist brethren, so that one day a more simple, a more functional PC will be made which will take people like me away from being crafty and cerebral.