The Corset and The Easel
Watercolour and the tropical urban feminist perspective
Collaborators-Soma Pradhan and Kaustuv Ghosh
Kaustuv: Soma and I work collaboratively out of the domestic space we share. Our small apartment suffices for the two of us and having spent a long time working from home, both of us have developed a rhythm that accommodates each other. We discuss subjects, perspective, colour. She critiques my writing. We show each other our drafts. The difference is that writing for me is a part-time pursuit while painting for her is a full-time profession.
As things go, we have learned to be in this together. I have come to understand over the years that it is extremely difficult for women artists to make their mark within existing frameworks. I would like to use this space, with Soma, to make an argument that the time has come for a new kind of idiom which is inclusive, equitable and representative of contemporary life.
We propose that this is the time for a feminine, tropical urban form of art.
Soma: Women painters operate in a world where they are underrepresented and hemmed in by societal constraints. It helps to be mindful that a woman artist always feels economic pressure, the stress of a domestic task calendar and the attitude of society at large towards the value of her work. It is easy to see how painting may be regarded as the generation of something decorative by some and a genteel hobby for others. The famous names are, of course, held in awe but they are remote personalities who can be conveniently worshipped at a distance.
They are also, mostly, men.
It is difficult for us to find a contemporary role model that she can point to and say, “Here is another like me and she succeeded, so do not run me down for what I do.” Famous artists like Hans Hoffmann, who himself taught Ray Eames, showed their condescension towards us back in the 1930s. As recently as 2013, there was an uproar in Germany over Georg Baselitz questioning our capabilities. There have been denigrating comments from many others too but we chose to look forward rather than back. I have been at the receiving end, as well.
Kaustuv: We begin from the premise that all people — men and women — are created equal and there is no difference in fundamental capability due to gender. Let us also be clear: painting is not about decorations, though a lot of buyers might indeed use artworks to decorate their walls. That in itself is not a negative; the display of art leads to it being viewed and interpreted or at least, experienced. The artist strives to generate meaning from every work. That goes into the accumulated inventory of relevance for future generations.
To start, what he or she sees is most important. The place and context within which the act of seeing happens is part of that. This is where the city is so important. Many trained and skilled women live in cities. These habitats offer sanctuary, mobility, opportunity and a degree of protection from traditional social bondage. In turn, they are able to shape the way the city appears to everyone else. This can be done without losing the empowerment it provides them.
Soma: Rather than looking back in anger, the urban woman can use technology to break free of the perceptual corsets that have historically restrained her. This is readily available to us. For example, the long reach of the camera and the easy, safe public transport of Singapore liberate me from being dependent on the pastoral imagery-based Impressionism which has been an almost exclusively male, European, and then Asian upper-class preserve. The city is right there, in front of my eyes and through the lens, I am able to get a very large body of raw material to work with.
In the golden age of Impressionism, the eye was the only way although photography started making an appearance towards the end of the 19th century. There remained well into this era, a lingering bias towards seeing without assistance, a heroic virtue somewhat akin to climbing Everest without oxygen. For a woman, outside the mainstream of male-dominated formalist painting, it becomes easy to disregard this.
There is one other bias that stayed on for many years, though unspoken. The bulk of Impressionist work was created in the West — at least, the more acclaimed body. The way light appears, objects are seen, everything is perceived differs vastly from one geography and culture to another. Gauguin brought a whiff of another world through his Marquesas paintings but he was a tourist. Let us not even mention Walter Spies.
Impressionism and much of what followed it, remained a predominantly Western idiom, pursued by and addressed to those who belonged there. Little is known of their tribe elsewhere outside the cloisters of art itself. Chinese, Indian and Japanese painters have incorporated influences from the West readily enough but often stay within self-imposed boundaries. A reluctance is palpable — an emphasis on the ornamental and a cold detached, stillness. Abstractions and pastoral landscapes seem to be a deliberate retreat into modernist interpretations of one’s own culture, an innate defensiveness that is both puzzling and disturbing. It is possible that this will deepen as globalisation comes into increasing conflict with nativism and cosmopolitanism may be seen as an aged handmaiden of colonial policy. That would be of great disservice to the world of painting — especially the schools and traditions derived from Impressionism.
This is because the bulk of the world’s productive industrial population today lives outside continental America and Western Europe and actively engages with everyone else as equals. One might argue with some credence that when Impressionism came along and for a long period thereafter, that the “rest of the world” was not in active communication with the Great Powers on a equal footing.
Now, that has changed. A car driving down a road in Beijing, a person going for a run in the countryside in Korea, and a lighted neon sign in Mumbai are all part of a larger network of global cultural production and consumption-without a master-subject relationship. There are massive, densely populated urban centres — megalopolises — with distinct architecture, culture and ways of moving.
Kaustuv: There are also a lot of forests, grasslands and coastlines. But with some exceptions (such as Japan, much of Siberia, Patagonia, deserts and virgin forests in different countries), empty vistas are rare. Even if cities are not nearby all the time, people are. There are people on the move all the time, for immigration drives economies and much of everyday work involves traveling. Before COVID-19, there were tourists everywhere, many of them visiting the classically defined Old World from Asian countries. It would be quite impossible to draw upon the traditional sense of Impressionism and Expressionism both to narrate this intermingling.
To put it a little differently, the luxurious pastoral settings with the occasional house and garden or the noble savages and their artifacts are not abundantly available anymore. This is a world that forces the artist to contemplate everyday life. The urban geography of Southeast Asia appeals to the woman. It is safe, interesting and full of stories. A city has many characters, different architectural and other built-up forms as well as constant motion. What the eye sees in a city changes every moment and the perspective of the artist dramatically alters the narrative.
As a small example, the city of Hanoi has a large lake which is apparently inhabited by a sacred turtle. For a Vietnamese painter, this is a site with many layers of meaning; for an outsider, it could be a nice place to draw a landscape from the viewpoint of a curious and perhaps empathetic observer. It is natural that the artistic outcomes in both cases would differ from one another. It is likely that the rich and complex history of the city and that particular place within it, would come out due to the efforts of these two very dissimilar individuals.
Soma: Cities have another dimension to them and none more so, perhaps, than these dynamos of trade and commerce. Southeast Asia straddles the South China Sea, the Malacca Straits and the Indian Ocean and the political economy of geography seeps into the palpable sense of belonging and othering in these cities. These are intensely competitive places — competition happens behind closed doors, in cafes and on streets. There are people on both sides of the geographic dividend and then there are those advantaged or otherwise by birth and origin.
This needs to be discovered by the rest of the world because Southeast Asia is not only a place where many travel, but is also increasingly critical from a political perspective. Watercolour provides the liberty to create a transparent, changing landscape within the built-up environment of cities. The amount of visual depth and layering of light across different structures inside the same painting, is revealing. The fluid nature of the medium creates a chimeral aspect of place which sits well with tension so representative of contemporary life.
(Kaustuv Ghosh in partnership with Soma Pradhan. All transcribing by Kaustuv)
Kaustuv(kaustuv ghosh) is a technologist, consultant, poet and traveler. Soma (Soma Pradhan) is a watercolour artist, published in the Rappahannock Review and Anatolios Magazine with upcoming work in other publications.
