Feel of the unexpected

Reflections of her environment and the people around her typify Anupam Sud's work. ANJALI SIRCAR profiles the artist.

ANUPAM SUD, Head of the Department of Painting at the College of Art, New Delhi, is today one of the world's most powerful graphic artists. And she has earned this reputation quietly and patiently, by acquiring a rare mastery over the forms of expression in all her works of art during the last 30 years of her career.

Like other demanding artists, she expects the creative act to offer her much by way of surprise, exuberance and rhythm of life, a series of shocks that stimulate our consciousness and give the feel of the unexpected. Her etchings are no reproductions from everyday life. She recreates the scenes and presents them in a style that is startlingly new, and in doing so, creates the possibility of fresh impact.

Born in Hoshiarpur in 1944, Sud went to school in Shimla, but her parents moved to Delhi and she grew up in isolation which made her shy and withdrawn. Describing herself as a person of "very limited interaction" Sud talked about the hypocrisy in personal relationships and the many contradictions she found in the adult world that she was entering. She made her choice - to remain single. "As a child, art meant a lot to me emotionally. Now art means everything to me," she said.

After graduating from the Delhi College of Art in 1967, she learnt print making at the Slade School in London and, being exceedingly reticent, had to be persuaded to hold exhibitions of her work. Over these long years since 1967, her concern has been with the human figure, placed in different situations, and the artist's graphics are basically her reactions to the contemporary social situations.

And what she communicates with deeply felt anguish is neither an elusive private experience nor a familiar earthy problem put across through banal imagery. Her images evoke a despairing inner view of urban reality, projecting cityscapes with male and female figures - unclothed - with darkened facial features speaking of a void within. Pavement dwellers, criminals, rickshaw pullers, prostitutes, pick-up girls, the poor and the affluent, sharing alike the general disintegration of life. It is a barren arid world with "no grass, no stream and no birds".

We realise at once that Sud has tried to annihilate all social connotations and seeks to achieve for her work a kind of autonomy. Though her graphics give evidence of tremendous skill, culture and understanding, these are not the attributes she is looking for. In the act of conceiving and working on her prints, she tries to forget these altogether. The refusal to know is not obduracy, but a patient overcoming of the commonplace, rather conventional knowledge. This is the price to be paid if her work is to establish a fresh beginning.

If one sets out to chart Sud's thematic preoccupations of the past three decades, one realises the following chronological patterns. Between 1968-71, she schematised human figures caught in sweeping currents. This is a generalised humanity with no specific social or cultural identity. From 1973-76, the artist's men appear to have acquired substantial form. But frequently, they appear as mysterious, even sinister figures - couched, headless or as silhouetted shadows. There is a stark atmosphere around them.

Thereafter, the architectural forms assert themselves. They dominate the human figures, although the latter still retain their impenetrable shadowy substance. The figures also appear in the open against backgrounds which evoke an element of past, nostalgia or regret.

In the 1980s, women began to make an impact in her work. Sometimes they reflect their inferior or abused social status. The situations in which they find themselves are strongly dramatised through the grouping and movement of the figures. There is a skillful use of light and shadow. The graphics gradually stretch to encompass the middle-aged, poor working women establishing their presence in the urban milieu. They go about their daily chores and are caught in circumstances which underscore their tragedy.

As the years pass on, the scope of the artist's works widened. Echoes of the distant, historical past, through monuments or religious iconography or the more recent past through decaying city dwellings are seen. The human beings are involved in habitual ritual, lost in thought or lonely reverie.

In works such as "Prowler", "Dice", "Fish", "Window II", and "Shifting Halo", Sud displays a complex handling of common elements. In some the figures are focal, in the others architecture and space speak just as strongly. When an artist does not seek to make a social statement, and yet remains figurative, the work gets imprinted with the abstraction of the intellect. Sud achieves just that. She is able to see the architecture of the human form, its sculpted fullness. This is the energy she captures in her etchings.

1977 was a crucial year in Sud's life. She returned to the Slade School of Art in London (where she spent her formative years studying print making in the 1970s), when one of her most significant works was created. At Slade, she found that etching had been all but abandoned in favour of the new electronic devices that ease the process of print making. The artist rejuvenated her skills in silk screen method and in lithography, and "In Search of Two Years From the Past through First and Second Class Mail" was a break from her easily recognisable works. These are large colourful silk screens in the magnified format of a posted envelope. To quote Roobina Karode who has analysed this work in Sud's exhibition catalogue, "They carry the spontaneous handwritten imprint of names and addresses by many of her teachers and colleagues. The monochrome human images are symbolic of people walking through time, in some subtle way their anatomies distinguish them from one another. Printing the stamp was accomplished after a backbreaking exercise, taken up as a challenge".

In "Aqua Pura", different types of water are shown as a metaphor to describe the values denoted to various relationships. According to Sud: "The implication of this work is that all relationships are pure but society frowns upon any relationship between man and woman that is unconventional. Just as it is not possible to distinguish river water from mineral or rain water, so too it is difficult to distil which relationship is pure and which is not."

"Dining with Ego", is a work that helps one conclude that print- making is an art form that should not ever fade away. A sharp contrast in image is visible, with the man eating merrily and the woman with an empty plate. The irreconciled situation creates a kind of visual discomfort in spite of the table with its luring spread. Said Sud: "It is upto the viewer to interpret who is suffering from a big ego. Is it the woman who is making it difficult for the man by not eating, or is it the man who is not bothered about the woman's feelings beyond his needs?"

She added: "My works are obvious reflections of the environment and people that surround us. But the reality existing in their minds is more real and meaningful for me than mere physical reality."

Apparao Galleries, Chennai, brought Sud's works in her first solo show in the city that provided a glimpse of the artist's early works as well. After 30 years, Sud remains passionately committed to print making, especially etching which she described as "an arduous form of art".

The artist has participated in a number of international print exhibitions and the awards she has won are legion. Her works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Library of Congress, Washington, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and numerous private and public collections throughout the world.

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