David Brayne Aurangabad - Blue Swing (2007) |
Ten members of the RWS with some wives and husbands arrived from the grey cold of an English January to the heat, dust and smoke of Aurangabad just as the sun was setting. The drive through the town showed us a place heaving and writhing with activity. The overwhelming impression was of an ancient Roman town with auto-rickshaws. Driving is bewilderingly speedy – large and small vehicles often crammed with humanity weave and race and swerve with horns blaring. Dogs and chickens and small herds of goats and buffaloes wander about the streets amiably mixing with the bustling crowds. Sadhus, the naked priests, walk briskly through the shoppers. Many people live in small randomly built houses and buy and sell goods in open shops and stalls. For an artist, all of this presents a wonderful and immensely rich subject.
Our bus took a sudden turn and we followed a lamp lit winding drive up to a huge gleaming cream coloured building, with a dome flanked by two curving three-storey wings. This was our hotel. The sounds of the traffic became fainter. The arid dusty land gave way to green lawns, tall royal palms and luxuriant gardens.
A splendidly turbaned and uniformed doorman showed us into a wide gleaming marble hotel lobby. We had landed in the lap of luxury. Our rooms each had a balcony with a swing seat overlooking the gardens. Our meals were all carefully designed and of superb quality. We found ourselves constantly thanking our host Vickram Sethi and his cousin Rahul Sethi, who lives in Aurangabad with his wife Veena. Vickram is a gallery owner and businessman in Mumbai, and he organises ‘art camps’, where painters gather together for a week or so and work together.
On the first day we visited the caves of Aurangabad. We drove out of the town and up into the hills and stopped by the road to observe the view. A wide plain stretched before us. Island-like layers of hard, volcanic basalt had prevented the erosion of the softer rocks beneath them, and this had resulted in flat-topped and conical hills remaining where everything else was washed away. All was dry and crackling. We could see the town of Aurangabad in the hazy distance next to a particularly large flat-topped rock. A little way off, and near a conical shaped hill, stood the Bibi-ka-Maqbara, colloquially known as the ‘Mini Taj’, a monument built in the early 18th Century by the son of Aurangzeb in memory of his mother, along the same lines as the earlier Taj Mahal. Richard Pikesley remarked that this spot alone would provide him with subject matter for at least a month. It was of this place that David Firmstone painted his remarkable landscape. The Aurangabad caves were a great surprise. They were made in very ancient times, the 2nd century BC until the 6th Century AD, and carved from the living rock – the hard granite-like basalt. The caves, which were originally painted, contain beautiful and very refined images of the Buddha and his attendants.
Agathe Sorel At The Delhi Observatory (2007) |
We settled down to a routine of painting. We were given a ballroom in which to work and some of us also worked on the balconies of our rooms. We would paint intensely in the mornings, have some lunch, and then work again into the evening. Some of the Indian artists worked on very large watercolours and painted with amazing speed and virtuosity. Their paintings are mostly rather broad in approach with single washes. Many of them seemed to work happily from computer and digital camera images, especially the younger artists. Some worked entirely from imagination and sketches, others from objects such as flowers. I don’t think I saw one Indian artist sit in front of a landscape and paint it. There was a good deal of interest amongst them in the cleanness and proficiency of a wash. Some used line in a rather expressive way, but there seemed to be little reference in their work to the tradition of jewel-like Mughal miniature painting.
It was fascinating to see how the RWS painters worked. Richard Pikesely decided to keep his work quite small, ¼ Imperial size (about A3). He would set off to a site – perhaps the Aurangabad caves or the hotel gardens where he would paint directly from the subject, paying special attention to the light and the time of day. He seemed to be able to grasp immediately the overall warmth or coolness of a subject, and adhere to it. At other times he would sit for hours playing with small pencil sketches, trying to determine a composition – the exact degree of a slanting line, or the proportions of sky to building to foreground.
Richard Bawden worked always from the subject, first in pencil, then with watercolour and pen. He was keen to draw in and paint figures from life sitting or standing before him. David Firmstone worked with great energy on large pictures, initially with an acrylic wash, then with watercolour and acrylic on top. He worked outside in the garden in the shade of a tree, and constantly referred to photos, which he printed on a small printer that he and Jean brought with them. He later worked directly from life on a large picture of the gardens.
David Brayne derived his imagery from memories of his wife and his daughter Jessica (who came with us), and from reproductions of paintings at the Ajanta caves. I saw him start a picture in red pastel, wash over it with water, and then work on top of it with his soluble acrylic medium mixed with powdered pigment. His pictures grew slowly through a series of layers.
Sarah Holliday worked on quite a small scale. The people and their lives in the town fascinated her. I went with her in an auto-rickshaw to look at and sketch market stalls, a mud brick works and a small Humanam temple. She painted a small luminous picture suggested by an open house lit up in the evening.
Janet Treloar was also greatly interested by the bustle and activity of the town, where she went and sketched. I also saw her, back from a trip, rapidly putting down her memories of a landscape in watercolour on a ½ Imperial sheet. Neil Pittaway painted with fire and energy – sometimes dancing as he worked to music from his headphones – working at breakneck speed directly in watercolour and felt tipped pen. On a trip he would stop at every opportunity and paint and draw what was in front of him. He spent a day in the centre of the town by a pool with a great banyan tree, painting the scene with all the people milling around. Simon Pierse also painted this view, in washes of subtle colour.
Wendy Jacob worked on smaller scale pieces, of a reflective nature. She found a view from the top of the hotel, looking across some open land to some small houses in the distance, working out her compositions in watercolour and pastel. The rural workers – the sugarcane cutters and their contact with the land, intrigued Agathe Sorel. She was secretive about her work.
Richard Sorrell Red Curtain (2007) |
Richard Sorrell sketched from life in the town and in the landscape. He also painted large invented watercolours with themes suggested by his impressions.
By the end of our stay it was most rewarding to find that each of us – and both British and Indian artists – seemed to have benefited greatly from the time. We could also feel with much excitement the quickening pulse of the art market in India. Rahul Sethi told me that whereas the value of property in India’s booming economy had escalated 400 times in the last 25 years, the art market had rocketed 2,500 times! The new wealthy people are keen to purchase pictures – objects that have no upper limit to their value.
There were treats for us: a wonderful evening of music and feasting at Rahul and Veena Sethi’s splendid large house in Aurangabad; a visit to a cottage in the hills for another evening’s feasting. Then there were trips to see the vast caves at Ellora, and on the final day a trip to Ajanta where we saw one of the wonders of India, a painted cave dating from the 2nd to the 6th Century, miraculously preserved, which seemed to hold in magical living form the vigour and vitality of life from remote antiquity. The effect was utterly overwhelming.
An exhibition of the paintings made on this trip, by both the RWS and Indian artists, was held at Vicram Sethi’s gallery in Mumbai in May, and then at Bankside Gallery from 21st June until 8th July.
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