Raja Jaikrishan's Page

The drawing teacher was a copycat. I followed him and got C grade. In a benign mood he painted a village view for me. I watched as brush strokes filled the blank sheet into a row of mountains, a stream, a clearing with well spread out tree. I brought the watercolor home. It curled along with my images of villages in the Kashmir Valley.
If I could, I would have fulfilled father’s dream of seeing me as a doctor. Father didn’t excuse me for it. I confined myself to my room. Allowed sex and art to distract me. After an argument with him, I made a bonfire of my art and poetry. I tried to focus on my course books, but sex and art got the better of me, not in the same order.
I flunked the entrance test to Art College and settled as a humanities student. Identification with Van Gogh me resume painting on sly. He like me didn’t have the temperament to copy without the suggestions of his delirious brain. For years I sprayed my mess on the canvas.
I got hooked to indiscriminate reading. My agitation with myself and family and colleagues went up .I wore knowledge on sleeves faking it as wisdom. My intolerance increased. It took me 26 years to rise from a newsroom boy to newsman. I reached to lakhs of readers through my art and culture writings.
I made myself to accept art in my distortions. Crazy? Yes that is me!
I tried to lose myself in the painting. I spoiled many a wear by blending colours with the thumb or fingers. I went on painting till the canvas brimmed with my mess and spilled it all over. All efforts to lift up the pictures were little success.
I painted like a blind without choosing colours for the juxtaposition of harmony and contrast. I stuck to the flat perspective to assert Indian roots. How dull?
The unquiet within spilled over the job and family. I held several shows. I competed twice but came back without a consolation prize. After the green flush of jealousy subsided I discovered fear had pushed my demons into my paintings which had put off the initiated. And as usual I gave away the paintings for a song.
The following poem The Exhibition by my friend Anupama perhaps has a point:
See you those paintings there?
They are part me—
Me—as I have grown from a woman-child
To my thirties
And they are part him –
Him-the artist
Whose love I was
And inspiration …
And then comes
‘The oblivion’
a painting
bereft
“Loving is short, forgetting so long…”
The colors ramble
Directionless into oblivion…
Yes-
I left him. I loved him, but I left him…
Because
I hated
That lack of strength
In a man of such potentials—
I wept
I shouted-
“You are a coward”
And hence a loser-
You have lost
Your home
Friends
And all those years
When
You could have
Perfected
Your art…
You know why?
Because you compromised-
Because you let them do
What they wanted to
With
Your life
You let them live
And make you
A living corpse
And now
You are losing me
Because you
Can’t break
Those aging, feeble bonds…
The poem went on describing our losses. For months together her weeping face haunted me. Mixing liquor with left out dregs of life I gave myself to art. To paper over my poverty of drawing and color choice, I went for collage. I tore pictures from one context and conjoined those in another context.
British thespian Wile Shepherd who saw the show in Chandigarh in 1989,has this to say about my show: “Image became a collection of images which took me into a bright flower of form and destruction cooled in the mystic breath of high unreachable mountains .The fine and jagged shapes tortured my senses while leading me into a complex story of loss, alienation and suffering –when the soft tones of exotically suggestive bodies clashed with the wrinkled face of despair. I also felt a strange joy as at the end of Shan’s Heartbreak Hour when the characters go out of their porch to welcome bombs being dropped on them from foreign planes .The war has begun when will it end?
In the Images I saw a despair that was commonplace, unexceptional, familiar. But the brilliant contrasts between red, white…blue made me think of spiritual colors uplifting and re-affirming the eternal. Marquez: “ Time passes. What did you expect? I saw tender memories of homeland patched together in something like a quilt of disjointed reflections—nothing remains as it was. Nothing changes.
‘The Bloom of Violence ‘,’ The Fire Inside’, ‘Winterscape’--I don’t know which gods they represent, but I had the definite impression of never-ending cycle of destruction and creation.
The Images 98 was my second exhibition in Chandigarh. Taru Behal bought the only work sold at the show for CII guesthouse. Later, I explored the little bully in me in the show ‘Exile’s Journey’, held at the Art Konsult gallery in New Delhi. The show annoyed the Tagore couple, the gallery owners because I had laminated the works.
In this series the little bully in me took the Charlie Chaplin’s characters of the tramp and dictator. These images coalesced with Kali and headless Laxmi. Among the visitors were Keshav Malik, Arpana Caur , Suneet Chopra ,Vinod .Yadav commented in the Art Deal.