A little gallery space tucked into a cul de sac off a lane opposite the most happening weekend destinations in South Kolkata, namely the South City Mall. That is where I went to see Misako Shine and Nilanjan Bandopadhyay’s little exhibition of paintings and calligraphy.
The word “little” evokes much more than “smallness” of scale in this context. It is redolent with a certain gaze – perhaps one of Japan’s enduring gifts to global culture, and certainly to the little place where I live and work: Santiniketan. The Japanese-ness of the artworks on display does not follow merely from the artists’ respective national and/or linguistic identity and cultural associations. To me, a lay viewer on a brief visit, the underlying aesthetic of the exhibition came across as intrinsically minimalist, and Japanese. I even tried a survey of Japanese art on the internet and found elements in the monochrome ink-paintings on display that to my untrained eye could be traced back to several eras of Japanese paintings. However, the real genesis of my impression of Japanese-ness lay elsewhere.
I was remembering Tagore’s essay ‘Lyric Poetry’. For Rabindranath, the lyric spirit of Japanese art rests not just in the chosen smallness of the canvas, but in the deeper privileging of simplicity as a conscious uncluttering of being and making:
In the Japanese house only one picture hangs in one room at a time and you have the chance and the leisure thoroughly to enjoy, to absorb and to assimilate the beauty of it into your soul. Then when after five days it has ceased to thrust itself on the attention longer, it is removed and the field is left vacant for a welcome by you to some other great picture. This is what I would call the lyric treatment of pictures. For the mind I must never have too much all at once. One really great picture at a time is enough, and too much is always the enemy of enough.
In a lyric poem you should be able to hear quite clearly the voice of the muse and to sense from it some expression of greatness, some ideal of perfection. … for one who not need bunches of flowers for the filling of some yawning cavity, a single flower is quite sufficient for the awakening of the inner mind, by the simple beauty of its form. (541-2)
Rabindranath was reacting against the juggernaut of Western urban modernity, no doubt; and saw it in its entirety as a principle of “bigness” (542). The kind of simple littleness that may be deemed a Japanese legacy is not about taking the viewer’s breath away. The point there is to abjure the epic, unlike in Guinness-record-making artistic engravings on microscopic surface area that often make headlines in India.
One may also turn to the ornate minutiae of Rococo art in early eighteenth-century Europe for a study in contrast. There, the surprise is in the intricacy of the part despite the ornamental splendour of the whole. Here, by contrast, the delicate simplicity of detail is not tucked away at some corner of a more elaborate and lavish visual symphony. Here the little holds pride of place. Long before Rococo, “a small island” – to borrow an epithet from the delightful Bill Bryson travelogue title (1995) – off the coast of Europe had flirted with miniaturism in the sixteenth century. Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits are as breathtakingly intricate as the Elizabethan sonnet in all its intricate complexity. By then, “the scepter’d isle” (II.i.722), as Shakespeare wrote of it, had already tasted the idea of a globe. Simplicity was not an option.
“Miniature” then is an inadequate label, for it is suggestive of a shrinkage of space rather than a paring down of concept. The exhibition I went to was not about that kind of miniaturing. Misako Shine’s monochrome impressions of the anatomy of flowers across three walls are life-size, a few perhaps larger than actual flowers. The seeing here offers a startling combination of the maximal and the minimal, rather than the mechanical diminution implicit in the word “smallness”. The brush strokes are bold and thick, except where the lines demand tapering. Intricacy of formal execution and photographic exactitude is not the obvious aim here. Instead, the focus is on extracting the essential form and reproducing that with a simplicity of touch. The idea is clearly that art should not be too academic in its understanding of verisimilitude. The accent, instead, is on a way of seeing “into the life of things”, a science of form that leaves some of the onus for recognition upon the viewer, instead of betraying an anxiety to make it appear as if it were an actual three-dimensional flower. Interestingly, that phrase – “seeing into the life of things” – is borrowed from William Wordsworth, who unlike other Romantics, was consciously reacting to the stylised excesses (not unlike Rococo) of eighteenth-century poetry.
The reality aimed for in Misako Shine’s floral anatomy is the vividness of the idea rather than the exactness of appearance such as in pictorial herbariums. The surprise – (and simplicity always surprises) – is in the ease of recognition despite the apparent inexactness of execution and representation. To be able to suggest exactly, without showing exactly, is the art of minimalism. The approximation of depth and lightness within monochrome by using varying liquidity is Misako’s key means of sculpting colour and layer on the flat white of the background.
Also, Ms Shine’s works accommodate a feminine world of birds and flowers, making for an organic thematic unity within the collection, for which the tentativeness in the meaning of the gallery name – “Charubasona”- i.e., the desire to make art, becomes a surprising metatextual equivalent.
Shine’s canvases point towards a gathering of the gaze onto the ordinary everyday lyricism of little sights as opposed to grand vistas. Misako’s birds, perching, preening, starting, striding, amaze with a different kind of lifelikeness, that of arrested movement. The sight of them took me back to a possible inspiration behind the exhibition title, “Magic Brush”. Many among us even in India grew up reading a beautiful Chinese story about a little boy who could bring things and scenes to life with a magic brush. The connection is far from arcane. Chinese influence on Japanese art is also well-documented.
Here too the contrast with the genre of depicting with exactitude the prettiness of birds, pioneered by John James Audubon is evident.
Some of the birds are drawn with a thick brush, some in thin but bold lines. The most powerfully vivid of Misako Shine’s birds is the one that shows the least: a black bird, perhaps a crow, seen from behind, preening its down with a bowed head, baring the under-down on the outer arch of its neck. Who has not seen birds do that all the times? A most common sight. To have rendered that with the surety of touch that it takes to shape a mere blot is the uncommonness of art. Simplicity then lies in the concealment of the artifice that it takes to attain the naturalness of life.
In this, the dialogue with Bandyopadhyay’s calligraphy on the fourth wall of the space falls into place. Having seen a recent exhibition of Bandyopadhyay’s calligraphy on larger canvases, this author quickly noted how Bandyopadhyay has selected only small pieces of little words – mono- or disyllabic – to form a seamless synergy with his collaborator’s pictures of little living things. Like Shine’s thick brush strokes, Bandyopadhyay’s words are leaping out of the frame: uninhibited, energetic, irrepressible. Bandyopadhyay too is keen on spontaneous, if not automatic symbolism, letting the hand inscribing each word mirror his mind conjuring the image evoked by it.
It is possible to contest the adequacy of “calligraphy” as a label for Bandyopadhyay’s works, even as one can see its moorings in Japan’s traditions in calligraphy. For, instead of decorating letters of the alphabet in themselves, Bandyopadhyay has made use of broad, sweeping strokes to inscribe letters that form the picture suggested by the words that they constitute. Bandyopadhyay’s restlessness with calligraphy is palpable here rather than easy acquiescence. He too is prioritising the organic flash of meaning in the mind’s eye. Sometimes this meaning-making is personal, such as with the word “কাছাকাছি” (close up), which interestingly shares a line – মাত্রা – that both connects and divides. Sometimes, the meaning is in the smudge that spoils the picture, such as “বৃষ্টি” or rain. With yet others, the meaning is conveyed through the space left between the pictured syllables, e.g., “যাই”” (I’m off), while others are thick and slurred beyond recognition, e.g., “ঘুম” (sleep), as though the letters had themselves dozed off.
I had started my viewing with the paintings before coming round to the calligraphy. What if I were to reverse the direction? Ultimately, this little tête-á-tête of texts seemed to underline the collaborative nature of meaning-making – between words and images, letters and lines.
It would only be apposite to mention another, ongoing exhibition here. Titled Vision and Visuals at Arthshila, Santiniketan, it memorialises the delightful collaboration between Bengali litterateur Rajsekhar Basu and his masterly illustrator Jatindrakumar Sen.
On a recent visit, I had found the same use of ink on paper and a monochrome palette! Yet the pleasure afforded by caricature is innately different from what the lyric seeks after. The essence is in the oddity, and the comic is inconceivable except through a subversion of proportion and a commensurate attention to disproportion. Comedy is a precise craft, that demands a fine pen, able to approximate to the generic form of a person or thing, while also bringing out its non-conformity to the standard. There is such variety in little things!
Works Cited
Aryaki M. “Engraving & Writing on Rice Grain – A Rare Talent!”, Rajasthan Studio. https://rajasthanstudio.com/engraving-writing-on-rice-grain-a-rare-talent/, accessed 5 October 2023.
American Robin (Plate 31), John J. Audubon’s Birds of America, National Audubon Society, https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/american-robin, accessed 4 October 2023.
Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island. London: Black Swan, 1996.
Ulak, James T. “Japanese Art”. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Japanese-art, accessed 5 October 2023.
Shakespeare, William. King Richard the Second. Open Source Shakespeare. George Mason University, https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=richard2&Act=2&Scene=1&Scope=scene , accessed 3 October 2023.
Tagore, Rabindranath. The English Writings. 4 vols. Volume Four: A Miscellany. Ed. Nityapriya Ghosh. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007; repr.2011.
Note: All photographs were taken with permission from gallery staff.
