Arts and parts

Over the past few weeks I have been paying a great deal of attention to the arts, more because I have to deal with that section of the newspaper I work in at the moment than anything else. Much of it is rubbish, written about and photographed more for the instant news value than anything else, spoken of because of the celebrities that attend the opening, or the ‘name’ of the artist involved, rather than the actual merit of the art involved. But today, in this particular realm, the more noise you make the better you are reputed to be, never mind that what you actually produce is not worth the space it occupies or the hype it is given.

And every time, with every story, I wander back to the past in my head, thinking of shows I have been to and artists I have met, most of whom have been huge names with huge reputations, all, in my ken, well earned. They are – or were, in some cases - people who were true artists, those who didn’t need the hype and PR that, more often than not, are part of the modern artist’s entourage today. Some of these people I was familiar with, in that I had seen their work all my growing up years, and could converse with some degree of intelligence on then and with them.

Perhaps the person who appealed to me most of all was Jehangir Sabawala. With his gentle smile and fabulously Daliesque moustache, he was someone I bumped into once or twice a year at a social do my parents would drag me along to. It helped, of course, that his daughter was once upon a time a friend, albeit a rather older one; we would sit on a sofa and exchange scurrilous gossip about the school we had both attended and make acerbic comments about fashion statements at the dinner we were at. I never did speak to her father except very casually, from the hi-bye-good-to-see-you-again kind of point of view, but I saw his work often and loved the misty colours and vaguely fantasy air they had.

Anju Dodiya was someone I liked when I met her. I was interviewing her for a new website and she spent most of the long weekend at the art camp I was infiltrating holed up in her room, working. Even while we spoke, she stayed almost hidden behind her canvas, emerging only briefly to refresh her palette with more blobs of paint or dip her brush in what was presumably cleansing solution. I sat on the floor almost under her feet, watching her bird-like movements and the totally absorbed look on her face and, finally, saw what was emerging on her easel. There was a quiet joy in her work and in her personality that gave me a sense of warmth and good feeling.

Some years earlier, I was sent off to meet B Prabha, one of the biggest names in contemporary Indian art. She had lost her husband only a short while before that and was rumoured to be rather difficult, I was warned. But I found her – when I did find her, tucked away into a basement studio hidden within a car park – she seemed to be a very sad, very grieving woman, one who still produced some fabulous work, but who was getting increasingly lost in the darkness of a mind that was full of loss and tears. She was an unbelievable talent who had fallen into an emotional abyss that she didn’t seem to want to climb out of. In writing the story after I had spoken to her for a while, I found my own mood becoming darker and grimmer, feeling like I had this enormous grief resting against my back that I could not shake off.

Since then I have met a number of extremely skilled artists, some with great talent, some with great publicity agents. And all of them have been interesting case studies in that funny psychological balance called life.