A Riot of colour, forms, texture, feverish strokes and lines greets you, rather hits you when you look at a Vikash Kalra painting. A self taught artist Kalra’s initiation into art is an amusing tale. In the early part of the millennium when the art boom had just started in India, Kalra read about Tyeb Mehta selling his triptych ‘Celebration’ for several crores; an idea germinated in his brain, he too would be an artist, it seemed an easy way to make some fast buck….little did he know then, how the wheels would turn. By then his automobile business too had folded up, and he had opened a secondhand book shop. It was here that a chance encounter with a book on Picasso burst a dam in his mind. The shop wasn’t doing well anyway so with his back to the wall, quite literally the shop wall Kalra began to teach himself how to draw & paint. Turning the pages of books on art and looking at images and plates of impressionist artists and the Indian masters in his book shop he immersed himself into swirling mass of colour and canvas – drawing and painting at a feverish pitch, covering the books in his shop with his outpourings of creativity.While studying the works of the masters in World art, he had an inkling to gain expertise in the subject he should also start to practice it. His inquiry about the courses at the Delhi College of Arts revealed that in a day they had just 2-4 hours of practice and that the course lasted 3 years. This did not suit him at all, by then a man in a rush to be an artist, he wanted to learn all that he could, soon; a year at best, six months if possible. So he immersed himself into self learning, studying, drawing and painting, frantically, for 12 to 18 hours a day. He began reading up on anything and everything that he could get on the subject of art – books, magazines, articles….. He had just a vague notion of art, but soon discovered that what his notion of Art was wasn’t really as he had figured it out to be. A venture that had begun in quite a frivolous way had taken a very serious turn by now…
His exploration of the great masters exposed him to their world; he began to gain an insight into their mind and their way of working, an intuition into their lives. He sensed in their work the openness of their mind, the playfulness and the joy. Their painting depicted their lives, their thought; they drew inspiration from what surrounded them, their world as they knew it, as they perceived it. It is this honesty that made their work classics. This was a huge learning for Kalra. He realised that there was more to art than he had assumed than he had previously understood. The need for honesty in art was an early learning for this artist.
His stint as a 2nd hand car dealer had taken him to furthest corner of India travelling to the nooks and crannies of the country, his senses and memory cells absorbed every visual stimuli, not having any inkling as to where they would emerge again. His canvases are often vignettes of these travels; blurry landscapes, distorted architecture and skyline as viewed from behind the windows of a fast moving vehicle. His world as he perceived it.
Travelling is a tribute to the world with our eyes; homage to its beauty. For Kalra his travels while delivering cars to his customers across the country resulted in a love affair with his country; this is quintessentially what his paintings are all about. As he says himself “my paintings is India, it is my love for my motherland”. His canvases try to capture the feel of India, the colour, sight, sound, emotions, paradox and even the fragmentation are reflected in his work.
The artist is unabashed in his admiration of the masters, one can sometimes see their ghosts in his works; his style including his preferred medium (oil) is almost a reverence to these great artists. That apart, the versatility of the medium appealed to his way of working, giving his work better depth and dynamism. While he was in this act of recreating the masters, at some point he realised his own original approach to his imagery had evolved…. by which time he knew that the painting bug had bitten him and there was no way he was going to do anything else….it had become his all time consuming passion, and with his many solo shows and group shows, he was selling too.
His studio at East of Kailash, in North N.Delhi is up a labyrinthine of steps first to his store room where he stocks all the paintings that he has created over time and then up another series of stairs to his roof top studio space, cramped with furniture, work tables, large canvases, smelling of linseed oil, turpentine, oil tubes and shelves full of books on varied subjects, from his days of managing his secondhand bookshop. He is also a connoisseur of music and over time has gathered a significant collection of musical instruments from across the world. The walls of his studio are adorned with these and Naga Masks. For Kalra art is his medium of emotional expression his music is a release to his soul; an exist point from the commercialism of being an artist. Some where you get a feeling that if he hadn’t become an artist he would have been a musician, and within him he still nurtures that secret desire. He has enthused his sons to learn Indian classical music the older one is learning the Rabab and the younger boy the Sarod. His abstract landscapes often remind you of musical scores resonating beyond an inner rhythm. Like the waves of an audio track on an equaliser, his landscapes are rich with the rhythm of life.
His has two other studios, his sculpture studio and in his home his drawing studio… and he happily switches from medium to medium; if he has been working with oil for a light fresh feeling he might practice water colour for a while. For a longer slower process he could sculpt. The typical freeman he says “I am not dictated by any external pressure my time is my own to devote to my paintings as I feel like”. An ardent admirer of Ramkinkar Baig, his initial experiment with concrete sculptures was not so successful, but it was a great learning experience. Now he works with fiber and clay, his sculptures retaining the strong linearity and the textured earthiness of terracotta and concrete.In a continuation from his past passion of devouring books that lead him into the journey through art and creativity, he muses – “I read a lot. A passion that came from selling newspapers as an newspaper vendor for a long time and keeping a 2nd hand bookstall too and now that I earn well from my paintings I spend a lot on buying everything that is there on art and creativity and architecture and all the arts…I have a collection of 40, 000 books, magazines and journals……what this reading does is to let me know world trends and also helps me in keeping my work fresh and original and gives me a sense of visual direction.”
A prolific painter, his work emote in a very passionate and intense way through these huge landscapes of the mind, the palettes which he states he recollects from his many journeys and perhaps through the many ups and downs he has experienced in his career. His palette though bright and vibrant in their backgrounds, the detailing done in a thick impasto technique revels in a passionate intensity, and one can see that Kalra has this intensity that while trying to imbibe the masters, he too has in master strokes expounded some of that passionate expression…a veritable artistic journeyman.
Sayanti Mukherji & Ranjan De
Sayanti Mukherji – an independent writer researcher, documenting & writing on art, travel, craft, textile and culture. Presently residing in Jaipur.
Ranjan De – Art & features writer for New Indian Express & Madras Plus, Economic Times City Supplement, Chennai, from 1996 to 2002. Presently residing in Jaipur
Vikash Kalra is a self-taught artist and writer based in New Delhi whose work has been exhibited across India and is held in several private and corporate collections.