By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi : He’s spent over four decades exploring the ‘bindu’ – or the dot – central to Indian spiritual iconography, and Syed Haider Raza, one of the country’s last few surviving masters of contemporary art, is yet to tire of the ‘razabindu’ – as the dot on his canvas is described by critics.
The 89-year-old artist is known for his “signature motifs of dots, triangles and circles” that fan across his canvas in the shades of ‘pancha tattwa’ – the five essential elements – shining in a palette of red, blue, black, orange and yellow.
“You have to concentrate on one idea. I usually offer one advice to young men, concentrate on one woman. One woman gives everything. One idea is sufficient for an artist. For me, the ‘bindu’ has been a vast subject with its variations throughout my life,” Raza told IANS.
The artist is back to the centrestage with a new solo exposition, “Punaragaman (The Comeback)” at the Lalit Kala Akademi.
Raza’s works make price history. Hailed as one of the country’s most expensive artists, he set a milestone last year when his work, “Saurashtra”, sold for Rs.16.42 crore in an auction at Christie’s.
The hype does not touch his persona – a soft-spoken creative being who defies the vagaries of age and flesh. Bound to a wheelchair after a fall in February, Raza is busy pushing new frontiers.
“I want to explore ‘Roopadhyatmik (abstract beauty)’ in my art. It is another spiritual form of abstraction which is beyond the conventional icons of triangles and the ‘bindu’. The concept emerges from the dot… And I have to find my own way to reach it,” Raza said.
The artist, who returned to India after spending nearly six decades in France, works “for two to three hours in his studio in the capital every day”.
“I don’t paint a lot, though I’m very keen to work. At times, I work for an hour in the morning and sometimes for three in the afternoon. I have assistants who help me move the canvases around,” the artist said.
The studio is austere – a whitewashed room in an apartment in a south Delhi neighbourhood meticulously arranged with rows of his canvases, an easel and framed artworks by several young artists, besides his own art, on the walls.
“I was married to a French artist. She died in 2002 and I thought it would be great to be back home. We had no children,” he said.
Alone in the apartment, the artist, who “believes in the power of Shiva-Parvati”, is paving the way for posterity with the help of a few close associates.
“I am collecting pictures from Indian painters – both contemporary and ancient art from the villages. I want to build an archive and a foundation to support Indian contemporary art,” he said.
“I am buying works by young artists… I look for originality, sensibility, new perspective and authenticity. Let us not compare between the generations… but I feel that artists are doing too many things at the moment,” Raza said.
“You should concentrate in one direction and work without change. The ‘Bhagwad Gita’ calls it ‘one religion’. The fact that artists have too much to do is partly because of the technical prowess and the lot of ‘bla-bla’ going on in this modern world,” he said.
Born to a forest ranger in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandla district, Raza grew up amid nature.
He began to draw at the age of 12. The artist’s association with the ‘bindu’ goes back to his school days.
Nostalgia drives him. “I think of Mandla, the Narmada, my teachers of childhood and professors. My art expression now reflects my state of mind, I have always been drawn to Hinduism,” he said.
“One of my teachers in Mandla had once drawn a sign – a dot on the wall knowing that my mind was wandering. He told me to look at the point while he went for a wash. I did not understand the significance of the ‘bindu’ then – but it existed in my mind,” he recalled.
The artist later “discovered the ‘bindu’ was there in Indian philosophy and decided to go to the source of the dot.”
The artist, inspired by “Rabindranath Tagore, Hindi poets and the popular Hindi culture”, was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1981 and Padma Bhushan in 2007.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at [email protected])