PORTRAITS WITH PAPER

Shakila Sheikh with her mentor Bal Raj Panesar. Picture by Sanat Kr Sinha Usual questions about style, subject or contextual references in her art do not draw stock answers from Shakila Sheikh. Technicalities — even the process of creation — play a minimal role in the larger picture of Shakila’s stunningly individual visual language. “I create images, I do not understand the ‘meaning’ of art,” she offers with characteristic reticence. This simplicity defines Shakila, one of the finest collage artists of her generation, in life as much as in art. While her creations have been showcased in every major gallery in the country and abroad, Shakila still works out of her home in the hamlet of Nurgram, near Lakshmikantapur in South 24-Parganas. Like every rural homemaker, her home and hearth take up much of her time. And then there is her art, usually created at night once the day’s chores are done. Like other everyday supplies, paper is precious in the Sheikh household; every bit of scrap is neatly stored should it serve a purpose in the layered collages that portray life as the 40-plus mother of two knows and interprets it. Often, that interpretation morphs into startling revelations on the world around her. Recognition is appreciated, but never striven for. And recognition has come her way in due time: the 2005 Charukala Award by the Academy of Dance, Music and Visual Art in West Bengal; the Lalit Kala Akademi felicitation in 2003; the Sanskriti Award in 2002; the honour of a Special Commission for the Gramin Bank installation for the International Trade Fair at Hanover, Germany, in 2000 and the national scholarship of the human resource development ministry from 1993 to 1995. On July 9, Shakila was honoured with the STAR Ananda Shera Bangali 2010 award. On the eve of STAR Ananda’s glittering awards ceremony at Science City auditorium, Shakila was her usual calm self, at home in the dining room of the YMCA’s Taltola branch. This is where her mentor, artist Bal Raj Panesar, has been in permanent residence since the Sixties. Shakila calls the octogenarian artist, a landscape and collage pioneer, “baba”. “She is my daughter,” says Panesar. The veteran artist first saw Shakila as a seven-year-old in the late 70s, when she would accompany her mother to Calcutta to sell vegetables. Panesar would walk down SN Banerjee Road, distributing chocolates to neighbourhood children, and also pencils and pieces of paper to encourage them to draw. Most doodles didn’t catch his eye, but Shakila’s stood out. “Even at that age, there was a spark in her works,” recalls Panesar. Well-respected as a teacher, Panesar took Shakila under his wings, taking her to exhibitions in various art galleries around town. While the drawings were mainly pencil-on-paper and thus in monochrome, the exhibitions were an eye-opener for her. “The first time I saw paintings, I was overwhelmed by colours. I had no idea that these many shades even existed,” smiles Shakila. Getting married to Akbar Sheikh at 16, Shakila continued to vend vegetables with her husband. Making ends meet was difficult, so Panesar offered the couple paper to make thongas and earn some more. Shakila used the paper to make collages, which “came naturally”, creating images from her everyday rural life. Soon after, Panesar gave her coloured paper which she started incorporating in her collages. The introduction to colours and their varied tonalities transformed Shakila’s works. Panesar’s layered approach to landscape also left a marked influence on Shakila’s earlier oeuvre; his collage-like oils and acrylic-on-canvas works mirrored in earlier pastoral works by his protégé. The early works were all done on cardboard; it was only in the late 90s that Shakila starting working on smaller canvases. The size of works gradually increased; by the time her first solo exhibition was organised at the CIMA Gallery in 2008, Shakila was working with 8’x12’ canvases. Her subjects, too, underwent a change. Shakila’s early works reflected her rural reality; later on, the pastoral images gave way to darker interpretations, of looking at the larger world outside while expressing the emotive responses from within. The recurrence of the goddess Kali as a metaphor for strength, of a basket full of eggs that are bombs, of women being harassed — these were images that looked inwards. “Her evolution as an artist has been this process of looking into her heart, unlike, say, Dayanita Singh’s, who explores the inner spaces of her mind,” says Pratiti Sarkar of CIMA. Her technique changed to incorporate watercolour-like chiaroscuro; each torn fragment of paper was meticulously chosen to give rise to a new whole. “None of the paper pieces that she chooses are selected at random; Shakila literally hunts for the perfect piece for each work,” says Pratiti. Her vibrant tonal palette apart, Shakila also moved away from Panesar’s influence, shaping her individualist style, especially in regard to forms and lines. In more recent times, Shakila has been experimenting with papier mache as a collage medium, creating her own material with soaked paper mixed with glue. At present, she is working on a solo exhibition. “The mark of a true artist is creating every day, no matter what. For Shakila, a day’s work done is past, awards et al. It’s tomorrow that remains a constant,” says Panesar. As appeared in The Telegraph Metro, July 14, 2010

Dream-kit makers drum up a storm

A bylane off Sitaram Ghosh Street would generally be considered a bookworm’s haunt. A typical north Calcutta neighbourhood close to the College Street book hub, the para exudes old-world, with its narrow alleys, buildings conjoined like Siamese twins and a million different publishing and printing factories. Not exactly a rock’n’roll environment.

The milieu, however, doesn’t deter Gautam Das, 43, from building one drumkit after another, tirelessly working in his tiny 12ftx10ft factory-workshop at the end of a blind lane, with just three assistants.

He’s been at it for the past 15 years. In all this while, the “expansion” has meant moving the “store” to a similar-sized room atop the main workshop. And, in a little over a decade, Gautam Drums, as his brand of instruments is better known, has become one of the first-call choices for budding drummers in the city, without burning a deep hole in the pocket.

Das’s store is not the only address in town for the drumming greenhorn looking for that budget kit. Over the past four decades, two shops in yet another bustling central city district, a stone’s throw from Lalbazar, have been the hub of locally manufactured drums.

Bapy Music, on Sunayat Sen Street across Rabindra Sarani, started it in 1971, building the first locally made drumkit. BCM Music Palace followed in a few years, specialising in fibreglass sets that became a rage in the mid-’80s and early ’90s.

In the US, independent drum-makers like this trio would be respected artisan-entrepreneurs, with adequate government support to help their businesses flourish. Custom drum-builders like Pork Pie Percussion, Dunette & Lang and Jeff Ocheltree are known the world over. All of them started in backyard garages.

The picture isn’t that rosy in this city, but our local heroes shine on. The reasons are simple: you can get stuff custom-made, not to mention the price. A decent imported drumkit comes for Rs 20,000, but the hardware may be rickety. And then there’s always the issue of after-sales services, accessories and repair.

In contrast, kits from our local drum-makers range from as little as Rs 2,500 to over Rs 15,000 for a full-blown, six or seven-piece set.

Mahadev Chakraborty, the owner of Bapy Music, started off with a gramophone retail and repair shop at the Sunyat Sen Street address in the late ’50s. “I was always interested in how drums are made. A Goanese drummer named Victor who often visited my gramophone store taught me what drumset design is all about,” says Chakraborty.

Das’s knowhow didn’t come from a very different source: he assisted a music instrument maker and was a master at operating the lathe machine. Once he knew the way drum hardware was built, switching to making drums was smooth. Setting up his own store was the next, natural step.

Bapy Music started rolling out the first locally-made drums in 1971: the first ones to be manufactured in Calcutta. Everything except the hardware — which Chakraborty imported — was built at his Lalbazar address.

Bapy Music’s drums caught on immediately, so much so that by the late ’70s, Chakraborty started sending out kits to Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. By the mid-80s, he expanded his workshop. “I started off with two assistants. Today, there are over 30 workers in our company,” smiles a proud Chakraborty.

BCM Music Palace on Rabindra Sarani was founded in the 50s by Bhimchandra Mondal — thus the name BCM. Grandson Tapas now mans the Lalbazar store, while his father Ashoke, 55, visits the store’s Howrah factory every working day.

BCM started manufacturing its sets from the early ’80s. “We had been in the music instruments business for over two decades before we started manufacturing our drums. We did enough research to find out what sort of materials we would need in order to make quality drumkits,” says Ashoke. In the turn of the decade, the company’s fibreglass shell model became an instant hit with city drummers.

Then Chiradeep Lahiri, former drummer for Krosswindz, Span and Bickram Ghosh’s fusion outfit Rhythmscape started off playing the drums in the mid-’80s.

“The very first kit I owned was a second-hand BCM make, which lasted me a long time. Gautam’s drums came in the early ’90s, and they were very decent kits,” recalls Lahiri.

Monojit ‘Kochu’ Datta of the Orient Express recalls playing BCM and Bapy Music drums “for almost a decade” before actually laying his hands on an imported drumkit. Even then, Datta still gets most of his stuff custom-made from Das’s store.

Ditto for Ritoban Das, drummer for Cassini’s Division and Debapratim Bakshi, drummer with Span and the Saturday Night Blues Band. Hip Pocket drummer and t2 columnist Nondon Bagchi — who owns a vintage Ludwig drumset that dates back to the ’70s — relies on Das’s shop for hardware-related problems and his drum cases.

ARKA DAS

Published in The Telegraph Metro, Saturday , April 24 , 2010

Musical nook where records rule

The Free School Street neighbourhood is a nostalgic nook of the city where firaangs still touch down to get a feel of what was once a bustling hub of hippie culture.

Just before the corner where the road takes a turn into the upmarket bustle of Lindsay Street, a series of quaint gramophone record-players lure passers-by.

Often, when the MTV-friendly trash on the CD systems run their daily course, the 76s circle out interesting tunes: jazz and blues standards, screechy Motown, the odd Elvis, sometimes Marley, Dylan or The Meters. Anyone who has ever had a record player knows the sound of a well-oiled one, and these shops maintained theirs well enough.

A stone’s throw from the intersection of Sudder Street and Free School Street, rechristened Mirza Ghalib Street, stands Record Prince, better known as Chacha’s shop.

Chacha —Anis Ashraf, 65 – hardly visits the store these days; it is manned by his two sons, Danish and Abid. This is the Mecca of vinyl records in town, not to mention a few well-maintained gramophone players, some of which are even up for sale.

The racks on display on the pavement with cassette tapes — yes, some of these still exist — and CDs of the latest Bollywood remixes are a facade that throws off all but the genuine vinyl aficionado.

The real gems are kept in a room, rather a musty hole in the wall, behind the shop. Stacked up in racks, the records are alphabetically arranged according to the artistes’ names. Each one goes right back to its place after a record-to-tape, or now record-to-CD, capture.

While he had sold off a large part of his collection a decade back, there are still over 5,000 records at Ashraf’s store. His collection is a Flower-Power music lover’s haven, a jazz aficionado’s well-kept secret and a roomful of rarities for the classical music devotee.

In the tiny backroom, Santana’s eponymous debut album from 1969, a bunch of albums by the Southern Rock legends Allman Brothers Band and Charlie Daniels Band, records from the Seventies by British progressive rock pioneers King Crimson and jam band pioneers like the Grateful Dead share shelves with jazz must-haves like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, live albums by the Bill Evans Trio and Weather Report classics.

Then there are records of everyone from Pandit Ravi Shankar to Debussy, Rabindrasangeet renditions by Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, not to mention a nostalgic 80s throwback with everyone from Jackson to Kraftwerk on offer.

Ashraf “inherited” the gems from their previous owner, Bakhtiar Jaan. As an employee of the nameless record store that Bakhtiar ran, Ashraf came to learn not just the technical details of how a 78rpm is supposed to run smooth but also about genres and artistes that were worlds apart from his upbringing.

Setting up Record Prince in 1965, he still keeps up with practices that he learned on the job. To this day, he maintains worn-out diaries that detail track names and artistes on a particular LP, year of publication and total length of the recording. Details like these were prized titbits that customers would lap up while getting “transfers” done, mostly to cassette tapes.

The music is one thing. Then there’s the artwork on these vinyls: imagine the excitement of laying your hands on original LPs from The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its sleeve after sleeve of sheer psychedelia, the paranoid face that reflects King Crimson’s alien soundscapes on In The Court Of The Crimson King or Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, designed by British graphic designer/photographer Storm Thorgerson.

“While a number of vinyl records from my collection are broken, there are a few that are over five or six decades old. The charm of the vinyl is that even with years of repeated playing, these do not lose their warm, rich sound. The same cannot be said about cassettes or even CDs,” Ashraf smiles.

And while he’s officially “retired” from the business, the magic of the vinyl hasn’t quite left him.

“I’ve handed over most of the duties to my sons now, but I still keep track of a rare LP being sold from Record Prince’s collection,” says Ashraf.

ARKA DAS

Published in The Telegraph Metro on May 19, 2010

Parallel universe of figure & form

Three young minds, three radical expressions, three visions, as it were. The Other Vision, the ongoing show at Studio 21, offers viewers a parallel universe of figure, form and lineation, a glimpse of the creative impulses of those at the up-and-coming fringe of the city’s art spectrum.

Sambaran Das, Goutam Khamaru and Anup Mondal, all in their late 20s, collectively conjure up images of urban disconnect. While the artists may not know one another or may not be very familiar with the other’s work, their conjoined milieu shares themes of abandonment and despair, giving shape to “other” images, of not just what the eyes see, but what it perceives.

The Expressionist lines of Sambaran, primarily using a tonal palette heavy in shadowy, muted browns and black, offer a deconstructed torso of an Everyman, an office-goer, replete with his leather portmanteau, sighing up without a head in Hole; an insect eye sits atop a figure lying head down on a taktaposh, transformed perhaps during a siesta on a lazy Sunday afternoon in Metamorphosis. Elsewhere, Sambaran handles a chaotic passenger compartment in Main Line Dailies; his vision of the entire jamboree presented in a surreal light, bathed in warmer tones of ochre, occasionally emphasised. Everyone’s present: the fruit seller, the ubiquitous newspaper reader, the card players, a bored standing throng, the gutkha-seller. The panorama is disturbed, and metamorphoses occur here as well. Sambaran’s strength, however, lies in his inanimate studies, the charcoal drawing-like quality of dry brush acrylic-on-canvas offering infinite interpretations of loneliness as its essence.

Goutam works with his sense of humour in place. His six works, called Animal Series I to VI, are in mixed media, tempera and acrylic. In each, magical creatures animate frames, not as one particular being, but as expressions. A composite of eyes, body colour, legs, tails and horns, these are figurative abstracts, his creations familiar yet not easily recognisable. His is an ornate style that fixes the gaze with its vibrant tonal palette, primarily warm in nature. In Animal Series V, the fanged hunter that pounces upon its prey actually flaunts a peacock-like plumage on its physical shape, whereas the hunted is done in black-and-gold reticulates. Functional opposites collide to question the Natural world.

Anup, whose twin works are both in aluminium wire and wood, offers details only when required. Both expressions of suffering, Blake’s Lamb and Persistence of Becoming Numb, are agonised figurations that perhaps needed more company to fit into context. Typically without a cognitive face, his aluminium figures are distorted, disjointed shapes that seem to haunt dreams of despair.

The show is on at the Dover Terrace address till February 12.

As appeared in The Telegraph Metro, January 30, 2010

BORN TO PLAY

INTERNATIONAL BASS STALWART VICTOR WOOTEN SAYS THAT MUSIC IS JUST ANOTHER LANGUAGE THAT CAME TO HIM NATURALLY

US-based Grammy-winning bass player Victor Wooten will be performing at GD Birla Sabhagar on April 7, as part of a four-city tour of India with a fusion ensemble. He speaks to t2 about his expectations from the trip, finding a place for bass in Indian classical sound and being born into a musical family.

What are you looking forward to on your India tour?

This will be my first trip to India, so I am really looking forward to visiting your country. I’ve heard many wonderful things and am excited to experience them for myself. I love the music, food, culture, and people, and am looking forward to making some new friends.

What are your expectations from Calcutta listeners?

So far, I have no expectations from the audience. I will just do my best and hope to make them happy.

You have been working with Indian classical musicians for a while now. Your maiden India tour is primarily with a fusion set-up, with classical percussionists along with (Chennai-based guitarist) Prasanna. How did this project come about?

I have Prasanna to thank for this visit. He has been trying to get me to India for many years now. I’m very happy that it is finally happening. He put the musicians together for the concerts. I hope I can keep up.

How do you approach the bass in an Indian classical context?

From my understanding, there is not usually any bass in Indian classical music. So, I just use my understanding and experience of listening to tell what to play. I also know that the other musicians will let me know if I am playing something that doesn’t work. But, because this is a blend of cultures, I expect to add something a bit different to the mixture of sounds.

What inspired you to pick up the bass as an instrument?

I am the youngest of five musical brothers. When I was born, they realised that they needed a bass player in the family to complete the band. That became my role immediately.

Was there any defining moment when you knew that you would be playing music for the rest of your life?

No, not really. I’ve been playing for so long that it has always felt natural. I can’t really remember when I knew I would never have to do anything else to make a living. I don’t think that I ever thought of it that way. Music, to me, is a language, and speaking it is a natural part of my life, just like speaking English. I’m fortunate to be able to travel the world making people happy with my music.

Who are your biggest influences?

My parents and brother have always been my biggest influences in music and life.

What is the secret of your signature tone?

Like our speaking voice, there is no secret to it except that we didn’t have to try to get it. We’ve always had our voice and have developed it over time — without much effort. Music is the same. Just play naturally and eventually everyone will realise his or her natural voice. Play well and everyone else will appreciate it and ask how you got it.

What is the most important quality a bass player should possess?

A good groove!

What do you look for in musicians you’re playing with?

I like playing with any musician who is a good listener. That is what is needed to make other musicians feel comfortable. I also like a drummer who doesn’t over play, has good time and plays tastefully.

Who are your favourite bass players and drummers in contemporary music?
There are many, many wonderful bass players on the scene. Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Oteil Burbridge, Carles Benavant, Janek Gwizdala, and many more. Dennis Chambers, J.D. Blair, Derico Watson, Will Kennedy, Steve Smith, and Roy Wooten are just a few of the many drummers that I like.

What projects do you have planned?

I recently finished an audio version of my book The Music Lesson. I hope to release it in the very near future. It was a very big project to complete with lots of readers and musicians. And yes, I also hope to record another solo project in the near future as well as continue teaching, sharing, and running camps in Tennessee.

ARKA DAS 
As appeared in t2, The Telegraph, March 26, 2010

Sigmar Polke at CIMA

Polke’s eclectic vision

It’s a fortunate proposition for the Calcutta viewer to witness a comprehensive sequence of Sigmar Polke’s works.
The Cologne-based artist/ photographer is a central figure in post-war German art and has been at the cutting-edge of moderne kunste (the modern art movement from 1968 which is “credited with irony, parody and…is audaciously poster-like in style”) with a constantly mutating style, with a marked irreverence for the conventional.
The series of Polke’s 40 gouaches on show at CIMA Gallery, titled Music From An Unknown Source, offers a glimpse into this eclectic artist’s vision. The exhibition, in association with Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, was inaugurated last Friday by film-maker Gautam Ghose, who spoke of Polke’s art as “explaining the inner soul”.
A biting, sardonic wit has always underscore Polke’s work, often hailed as an anarchist trait. He had been one of the founders of the Capitalistic Realism, the anti-art movement which started in Germany in 1963.
The works on display all date back to 1996; much later than the period in which Polke was still discovering his visual language. These gouaches offer a glimpse into the fluid evolution of that idiom; the art surpasses boundaries of a language to morph into symphonic music; of tone, texture, form and figure. The title of the display warrants this process.
Comic strip-like drawings and digitised photograph-like images share wall space with splashes and tonal swirls in this mid-90s series, replete with titles that are often snatches of conversation; perhaps a nod to Dadaist influences. In his curatorial note on the display, Bice Curiger points out Polke setting “traps” that “some interpretations would appear to walk straight into”.
“There, Have A Bit More Caviar, It’s Delicious With The Vodka”, reads one. The corresponding image is of a street scene, a situation which can give rise to a hundred interpretations. The ambiguity of image and title — the latter obviously a lead-in from the artist to coax the viewer into the game of analysis — is deliberate; perhaps a hint at encouraging freedom of thought, from convention, as it were.
Vibrant colours, especially crimson and lilac, a latter-day obsession with the artist, invade some of the “figurative” poster-like works: a family portrait in According To Statistics Every German Owns 10,000 Things.
The figurations are almost surreal, dream-like. The geometry often veers to the chaotic, but converges on a harmonious whole. The social commentary is all-pervasive, albeit always with the humour in place. Even on blatantly sexual themes, like the Sphinx of Sigmund Freud, with a nude man and woman lolling in the foreground, presents a nebula of papercut cards with pop-artesque baby figures on them. The elemental is another recurring motif.
Polke is known to use everyday objects in his work — paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in a single frame. Music From An Unknown Source presents gouaches, where the unique rhythm of Polke’s art finds new expression in a molten, disintegrated cadence.
Given the analogy of music, it is fitting to quote one of Polke’s titles to define this show: “What’s it actually about?” “What do you find in your mouth?” “I find the inside.” “And in the inside?” “In the inside I find the morning”. “Listen, your mouth is made for your ears. Listen.”

ARKA DAS
As appeared in The Telegraph Metro, April 19, 2010