Lady in the Painting
By Kaustuv Ghosh (kaustuv ghosh) and Soma Pradhan (Soma Pradhan)
A couple of weeks ago, Soma and I set out to write collaborative essays to present an alternative view on art and design. This is the second piece in the series.
Soma: The watercolour above depicts three women friends heading out after catching a movie. A woman is not obliged to go back home after seeing a film, though of course she might. She could, equally, decide to go for a drink or shopping with her friends. These are self-confident, independent people. They take their own decisions.
Kaustuv: The place of women in contemporary art work is an important part of the overall story of social progress. This deserves to be actively pursued. We live in a highly urbanized world which is constantly absorbing old traditions, new practices. events, artifacts, artifices and conflict. This is dense, noisy and full of contradictions. This complexity has not been captured well in recent times, with a lot of focus remaining on portraits and abstract paintings. Portraits depict people in created circumstances(the pose, the gaze, the studio), often depicting an assumption of power and privilege. Abstraction empties canvases of the ongoing struggle for equality and the cruel choices facing many. Artists must not let the formality of art skirt the questions of place and agency. We feel women remain underrepresented as well as misinterpreted in art. This has to change.
Soma: I am concerned at the exclusion of the following: women from the other side of the world(outside the West, which today means people like us) seen from their own perspective, and women in the contemporary tropical city. Unfortunately, we are still viewed mostly through Western eyes, to borrow half a line from Conrad. In cinema and advertising, Asian woman are usually found in a stereotypical role. It has been changing somewhat, thanks partly to Korean cinema and the growing profile of immigrant achievers in the US and elsewhere.
Even so, there remains the need for a key breakthrough. This is what I have been working to achieve, in my own small way. There are layers of issues a woman painter has to work through, when it comes down to it. As an immigrant, one is free of familial baggage which allows for a certain amount of personal freedom. But there is also the very real knowledge of history and circumstance of the adopted home as well as one’s own lack of a deep social network. These can act as constraints. I have to strip away the historical way of depicting women-the face, the poise, the socially acceptable body language. The rapid movement of real-life existence has to be brought to the fore. In a city, a woman may well be much more busy than a man and this cannot be underestimated. Her private moments, whether alone or with friends, are often few and have many anxieties lurking in the background. These tensions and contradictions need expression.
Kaustuv: How we see one another is often determined through the media content on offer. With mobility and urban living, those who significantly differ from one another come into regular contact. This increases the scope for othering. I feel art has an enormous opportunity here — which remains untapped — of bridging the perceptual gap between people.
Soma: The women in my paintings are people of this age. They commute to work, watch movies, smoke and drink, are active on social media. By bringing them into the representation of our post-modern tropical landscape, I wanted to send out a clear message: here we are and this is who we are. I have used my learnings from fashion illustration to ensure they have a palpable presence and intrigue the audience through their liveliness.
It is also important for audiences to understand how women see women. We cannot remain curiosities as artists and decorations in paintings or, for that matter, objects for voyeurs. We must be active contributors to the scene inside the frame. A great loss to art has been how little there is in the public domain about the evolution of the female form, clothing and public presence in Asia, over the last hundred years or so. We must document our time, from our perspective, before this too is lost.
In this matter, we all owe a debt to Toulouse-Lautrec. I do not know how he is regarded among young people today but his illustrations of nightlife showed women are radical. I feel he did not take away from their dignity but instead added strength to their presence. Of course, his style contributed a lot to commercial art and now we are here. I am also a great admirer of Georgia O’Keefe. Her work in New Mexico is very different from what I can produce in Singapore. But who she was and what she did remain both important and inspirational.
I would like to make one last point. Recreation or pursuits are a subject matter dealt with extensively in paintings. The most well-known examples come from a period of a leisured class arising in Europe (and the Americas) on the backs of the Industrial Revolution and wealth extraction from their colonies. Today, people in the cities are not the beneficiaries of colonization(at least in its most naked form) or of immense wealth from industrial activity. The middle class is being decimated by repeated cycles of economic slowdown. The pursuits of the people we see around us are certainly not that of the classic leisured class. Going to the movies is now less frequent that it was even last year and what I have painted is a record of something poignant, going by events around us.
