Thinking Hat’s Weblog

OM PRAKASH—EXPLORING SHAPED CANVASES 

 

By Vincent Van Ross

 

Of all the works and reproductions of Om Prakash’s creations I have seen, I found his series of paintings using the color white, most unusual.  My innocent query on this series brought out the spellbinding story of his visit to the Arctic Circle.

 

There was a childlike excitement in him when Om Prakash described his first experience of the ‘aurora’ which means  Arctic light.  “When I crossed over to the Arctic Circle, I saw a sudden flash of this amazing spectacle of solar light. It was very bright and sharp on the eyes,” remembers Om Prakash.  But what he saw was not a fleeting moment.  For six months at a stretch, the Arctic Circle has nothing but days.  There is no night…no darkness—only bright daylight all 24 hours of the day. Since the arctic region is covered with snow, it is just white, white and white all over.  Om Prakash decided to capture this amazing spectacle on canvas. He did a series of paintings using white on white  though it is very difficult to create contrast levels with white.

 

In a career spanning over five decades laden with experiments, the obsession with art steered Om Prakash towards different mediums, different themes, different concepts and different places in his long and passionate journey in the world of art. Despite the hardships of his early life, Om Prakash insists that the happiest moment of his life is when he signs a painting marking the completion of yet another creative work.

 

 Om Prakash was born in Punjab in 1931. He graduated from Agra and studied at the Delhi Polytechnic.The oldest of four brothers and two sisters,  family responsibilities weighed heavily on Om’s shoulders.

 

In the 1950s, Om Prakash traveled extensively across eastern, western and southern India to study the rich heritage of Indian art found in temples and caves. The academies and institutions for promotion of art set up after India’s independence and the cultural exchange programs that followed broadened the perspective of the budding artist in Om Prakash  and helped him develop a style in tune with global culture.  During this decade,  he concentrated on watercolors and drawings.   Some of his watercolors were executed in a wash technique prevalent in the Bengal School and others were landscapes of Delhi and its neighborhood painted in the British School style. He was also engaged in a lot of commercial art during this period to meet the monetary obligations of his family. However, he quit commercial art one fine morning in 1960 when he realized that it was taking too much of  his time and there was little time left for painting.

 

Om Prakash took to playing sitar in 1956 and came in contact with the sitar maestro,  Pandit Ravi Shankar, who introduced him to the traditional iconography of ragas.  Inspired by this, Om Prakash executed 25 Ragamala paintings in watercolor. 

 

 The sixties saw a variety of events in Om Prakash’s life.   In 1960 he visited Kashmir and in 1962 he went to Dalhousie.  In 1969, he visited Kashmir again and found himself in the lap of the awe-inspiring Himalayas.  He returned from these trips with a rich haul of sketches. Some of these sketches he later used to make paintings. 

 

In 1961, he joined the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi as an art teacher which gave him an insight into architecture and design. He set up a large studio and executed several innovative projects with the brilliant students there.

 

From 1964 to 1966, Om Prakash was in New York for post-graduate studies in art and art history at Columbia University on a Fullbright scholarship.  His studies included research on well-known artists who copied old masters.  He took lessons in Chinese calligraphy under a Chinese master and learnt its special techniques.  He painted about a hundred small works on rice paper in Chinese ink. Unlike western artists, Chinese artists do not view their subjects from eye level.  Instead, they look at it from the top which puts the subject below eye level.

 

Subsequently, a Japanese master taught graphics to Om Prakash.  He learnt lithography, etching and wood-cut engraving. However, he did not pursue print-making because he realized that it was not his cup of tea. He worked with oils and acrylics on canvas and made many drawings in dry mediums from live models during his stay in the United States of America.

 

On his return journey to India in 1966, Om Prakash traveled through many European countries for four months studying art in museums and galleries. What he saw made him realize that perhaps everything conceivable had already been painted with excellence.  Since he was committed to creating something new and unique, he found himself in a helpless situation.

 

The idea of playing with space by fixing different forms of wooden pieces on board, got Om Prakash going again. The collages he created in that series marked the advent of geometric forms in his works.

 

In 1967, after the release of Ajit Mukherjee’s book titled ‘Tantra Art’, some of the Indian artists including Om Prakash were labeled as tantric artists.  It bothered him so much that he decided to clarify in the April-September 1971 issue of Lalit Kala Contemporary in these words:

 

“I am no Tantric and I am not interested in reviving or simulating Tantra Art.  I could not even if I wanted to.  Whatever our understanding of the Tantric thought based on  recent important research, it can at best be of an indirect kind in the present context.  More than this it was the Tantric philosophy of self-realization and the magnificent concept of discipline in everything and on the highest plane which could influence and inspire me.”

 

Om Prakash continued to practice the sitar while he was in the United States and presented many concerts there. After his return to India in 1966, he took sitar lessons from Uma Shankar Mishra, a senior student of Pandit Ravi Shankar at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi, for three years.  Later, he scripted four films on India’s Classical Musicians which were produced in 1970 by  James Beveridge, a Canadian film producer of eminence.

 

In February 1969,  Om Prakash met Swami Mukhtananda in Delhi.  Their interactions continued both in India and the USA until the death of Swamiji.  The high point of their interaction was their exchange of ideas on the meaning and place of spirituality in the context of creativity.

 

Between 1960 and 1970, Om Prakash created over 200 works, of which a painting titled ‘Bhairav’ bagged the National Award from Lalit Kala Akademi.

 

A talented young girl, Kathleen, entered Om Prakash’s life in 1970,  She was an artist, a weaver, an art teacher and a dancer. Kathleen influenced Om Prakash’s art both aesthetically and spiritually.  He went to New York in 1972-73 and 1975-76 to live with her.  Finally, she gave up everything and came to India in 1976.  She took to teaching art at the Woodstock School in Mussoorie.

 

Most of the works Om Prakash executed in the 1970s were based on geometrical abstraction and symmetry.  His ideas were substantiated by symbols and elements of nature.  This period also saw some innovation in his works in terms of technique which included working with wood, shaped canvases, watercolors and small format works in acrylics. This accentuated his belief that creativity starts when all kinds of narrative and illustrative content with the use of known and familiar objects were completely avoided.  Periodic sojourns in the mountains near  Mussoorie brought him close to nature and  it dawned on him that everything he was creating through geometry existed in nature. 

 

It took months to develop concepts for painting geometry in oil colors on canvas and execute them even though Om Prakash was painting four or five of them at a time.  As a result, his visual ideas were piling up and he translated them into small format paintings on board and paper in acrylics. In 1976, inspired by the Mussoorie hills, he once again began painting watercolors.  In 1978, he started painting in shaped canvases breaking the age-old practice of  using the rectangular format.  His paintings started appearing in triangles, pentagons and hexagons among other shapes.

 

In April 1981, Om Prakash joined the College of Art, New Delhi as its Principal.  One of the first things he realized was that he no longer had a studio like the one he had at the School of Architecture and Planning. Moreover, he was swamped with pending projects of the college and administrative and academic backlog.

 

Three crucial years at the peak of his career were lost before he found a small room near the College of Art in 1984.  Obviously, there was a change in the concept and theme when he started painting after three years.  This marked the advent of nudes. He painted 22 nudes in this series.  What set his nudes apart was that they dissolved into geometric shapes.

 

His office moved to the new college building in 1986 which had a studio in it.  And, he started painting large square Mandalas. The late 1980s saw a boom in the art market.  Art exhibitions, auctions, collection and investment became the order of the day.  This augured well for contemporary artists as their works began to sell at lucrative prices and also got a lot of coverage in the media.

 

In 1992, Om Prakash retired from the College of Art.  Since then, he has devoted his entire time to painting, playing the sitar, reading and writing.  Between 1990 and 1998, he dabbled with oil and acrylic on canvas and small format works on paper. He also worked on sculptures on stone and wood.  But, for a man of 75 years, Om Prakash is still in going strong.  As he says: “an artist never retires.”

 

The year 1994 saw the publication of Om Prakash’s book “Art in Art” which dealt with the parameters for evaluation of art; art as a means of communication and _expression at physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels and the concept of beauty in art among other things. When I browsed through the pages of this book, I realized how meticulously Om Prakash had maintained the record of his creations from the very beginning.

 

Om Prakash held his first solo show in 1958 in Delhi.  Since then he has put up over 50 solo shows in India and abroad.  He has also participated in several group shows.  His works enjoy a pride of place in prestigious collections in India and abroad.

 

Om Prakash found the role of rectangles in our daily life very disturbing. We sleep on a rectangular bed.  When we wake up we see sunlight filtering in through a rectangular window.  The door we open is rectangular in shape.  The morning newspaper and the books we read are all in the rectangular format.  The mirror we look into is a rectangle.  The table on which we have tea is rectangular. The park we go to for a morning walk is a rectangle.  The laptop we use is a rectangle.  When we travel by a train or a bus, we look out of a rectangular window.  When we shoot a picture, it is in a rectangular format. Paintings and drawings are executed in the rectangular format. “When geometry can create millions of shapes, why are we stuck with rectangles?” asks Om Prakash.  “Why is it that the rectangle dominates our lives and our visual perception?”

 

Om Prakash decided to break out of the shackles of this phenomenon of rectangles we have subconsciously got into. He began to paint on canvases of variegated and unusual shapes. Triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons, octagons…the list was endless.  Suddenly, he realized that there was a whole new world of possibilities opening up in front of him.  But, he had to shape his frames and stretch the canvas on these shaped frames.  For that he needed a good carpenter.  Fortunately, he found a dedicated carpenter who prepared canvases in different shapes for him. Then he tried some irregular shapes. He used a square canvas diagonally. He also did a painting on a circular frame.  It was not easy to stretch a canvas on a circular frame.  So, he cut a circle out of a board and pasted the canvas on it. 

 

“When one works on a rectangular frame, perspective and distance come automatically,” explained Om Prakash. “So, working with shaped canvases was not easy. One does not enjoy the freedom one has with a rectangular format because one has to deal with so many corners in a shaped canvas.  Besides, it was too demanding and too mechanical.” Asked whether he would ever get back to shaped canvases, Om Prakash rubs his chin thoughtfully and says: “You never know…if I get a good carpenter, I might give it another try!”

 

-:oOo:-