Magical Art

I was sitting in the waiting room of the surgeon who had operated on me hoping to be called soon. It was 7.30 in the evening and the room wa...

I was sitting in the waiting room of the surgeon who had operated on me hoping to be called soon. It was 7.30 in the evening and the room was full of anxious looking patients clutching reports and X-rays, awaiting their turn. There were several others who stood outside. When, I wondered, would the clinic empty out and the surgeon go home. He had started the day with several surgeries; yet, deep into the evening the day continued its relentless pace.

When I met him a while later, I asked him how he continued to be concerned and kind under stress and what were the things that gave him joy and washed his fatigue away. He changed; the doctor disappeared and he sat back, even though the exchange was brief. “Paintings,” he said, “their colour, their life and their beauty. They sustain me and make me forget the world. They bring sense into my life.” It is not enough that he is sustained by paintings. The healing touch that he extends to innumerable people in distress continues to remain beneficial because of it.

Nature, art, music, literature, architecture and dance of exceptional quality always provide the human spirit the opportunity of flight into the domains of bliss and pleasure. They are also the wings that can help us fly towards God and spirituality. Stress strikes us from all sides; commuting, competition and complexes drown us in depression. But if we were to take refuge in beauty and allow it to run like a thread throughout our lives then the trauma of life would be so much more supportable.

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I was reflecting on these thoughts the other day while I stood looking at a watercolour by the painter Bhupen Khakhar at an exhibition just a day after his death on July 8. It was a simple painting, of a man holding flowers, his hair flicking on a wide forehead like a comma, looking at the viewer with wide oval eyes full of innocence and sweetness. It was a painting that beckoned and a painting that made me forget the headache that was turning its pressure on. I felt a sense of regret that a painter as gifted as Khakhar would no longer be manifesting his wit and his genius with the brush and pen, for he was a writer as well.

Yet his death passed almost unnoticed in the print media. I believe that the death of a vastly talented painter, especially one who has both contributed to and influenced contemporary Indian art, who delights and charms viewers and collectors and who is viewed in the art circles abroad as an artist of consequence deserves serious mention in newspapers.

Bhupen Khakhar was born in 1934 to a lower middle class family from Gujarat but who spent his early years in Mumbai. He became a chartered accountant with the help of his family and continued to work even after he was a recognised painter. Creativity can emanate from even the most prosaic environment as it so often happens, so varied are the sources that bring beauty and relief to mankind. So it was with Khakhar. But he lifted the ordinary and the banal to artistic heights with his humour, his sense of colour and the complex narrative of his works. Thus rests Bhupen Khakhar, artist, writer and chartered accountant.