A Face of the Wall

$275
Item Code: OT31
Specifications:
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions 29.5 inches X 29.5 inches
Handmade
Handmade
Free delivery
Free delivery
Fully insured
Fully insured
100% Made in India
100% Made in India
Fair trade
Fair trade
A rare and astonishing experiment on canvas, something beyond colours to portray, and imagination, to conceive, allowing the eye to be dragged by its strangeness but incapacitating it to travel beyond discovering into it a form, its identity, meaning, aesthetics, or even its broad domain, might be seen as representing a human face, a face with trans-sectarian, trans-gender or trans-age identity : a Buddha, or Nanak, immersed in deep thought, or a deserted woman with a mind struggling to find a ray of light in the darkness descending upon her mind, a piece of some ruined temple’s façade, a fragment of an isolated sculpture lying in the ruins of an archaeological site, a deity with unknown sectarian identity inspiring the fearing mind to scatter over it flowers, and differently allowing the technocratic, to distort it by driving into it nails and laying across electric wires, an awful talismanic castle, like one of Arabian tales, with entrances and exits styled like a human face – the cracks-betraying age-worn lime-coating adding further mystery …, a mesmeric phenomenon deluding the mind with the appearance of form, transforming into another, and then dissolving to become a non-form.

Oil on canvas, the key to the painting’s theme reflects in the old proverb : ‘the walls have ears’, that is, ‘the walls do hear’. In the painting the proverb seems to have changed to ‘the walls have eyes’, that is, the walls do witness whatever takes place and store it : rise and fall of empires, magnificence and grandeur, cruelties, betrayals and instances of injustice, blood-shed and vengeance, annals of mad love, great sacrifices, and love’s failures, unnourished children crawling deathwards, helpless parents selling their loved daughters for money, great masters with compassion in eyes for suffering masses … With the mad pursuits of love of Baz Bahadur and Roopmati the walls of their palaces at Mandu, their love’s witness, still seem to move. On the marble-clad walls of Musammam Burj at Agra’s Red Fort, where the Mughal emperor Shahjahan was his son Aurangzeb’s captive, the agony and the painful death of a helpless emperor, the most luxurious of all Mughal rulers, more blatantly reveal than does the marble’s translucent brilliance.

The mud-wall of a poor man’s hut is Iravan’s lifeless severed head that witnesses what even the living eyes fail to do : a dream emerging in an eye and dying pre-mature; a grain of food taken away even before it reached the lips of its inhabitant’s child, a helpless father with bowed head bidding adieu to his daughter bare-handed, deaths without medicines, childhood without milk, bodies in bare loincloths, a bent spine at thirty, a child, a girl or a boy, put at a construction site at seven or eight ... In a subsequently added tradition to the great epic Mahabharata Iravan, the Arjuna’s son of Ulupi, a princess of a serpent clan with half serpent-half woman form, was killed the eighth day of the Great War but his spiritual desired prevailed and he was able to witness with the eyes of his severed head hung on a tree, to the last and far and wide, even the minutest event taking place in the Great War. Not human anatomy, walls have perhaps Iravan’s severed head and the spiritual desire to witness, and this face : a wall’s face, manifests it.

A simple piece of canvas, rendered using oil colours, or rather a blend of them except red used in its basic tone for drawing an electric wire and a few rose-petals, it seems to represent a wall-part carved with features of a human face contained in a square frame : elegant and perfectly modeled lips, a nose as composed of two separate parts, the cylindrically terminating vertical, and the symmetrically carved well defined nostrils, curving thick roundish eyes fully covered under bell-like shaped eyelids, as if assembled separately, and the eyebrows perfectly aligning with nose-line creating the effect of a typical Victorian building having a front elevated with a pair of tall portals with circular apexes joined by an intermediary pillar. Cracks revealing all-over is obviously suggestive of a wall with stucco forms. The artist seems to have used the negative and positive energy wires to symbolise the energy’s under-current which defines both, the face immersed in deep thought, and the two wires.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr. Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of literature and is the author of numerous books on Indian art and culture. Dr. Daljeet is the curator of the Miniature Painting Gallery, National Museum, New Delhi. They have both collaborated together on a number of books.

Oil painting technique – India centric

Oil painting is the most interesting technique in art. Unlike other paintings or art forms, oil painting is a process in which colored pigments are painted on the canvas with a drying oil medium as a binder. This medium helps colors blend beautifully to create layers and also makes them appear rich and dense. Several varieties of oil are used in this painting such as sunflower oil, linseed oil, etc., and depending on the quality of the oil, a particular consistency of the paint is developed. With the use of an oil medium, the painting gets a natural sheen on the surface which appears extremely attractive. India is famous for its old tradition of making oil paintings. This art form was brought by Europeans in the 18th century and is now practiced by almost all well-known artists. Nirmal, a small tribal town in the state of Telangana is the center of traditional oil paintings in India where the local people practice it with dedication. Most Indian artists still use the traditional technique of oil painting.

Canvas of the required size is prepared

The artists use either a wood panel or canvas made from linen or cotton. Sometimes the canvas is stretched onto the wooden frame to form a solid base, or cardboard may be used. The canvas is coated with a layer of white paint or chalk mixed with animal glue. This mixture is then smoothed and dried to form a uniform, textured surface. The wooden panel is more expensive and heavier but its solidity is an advantage in making detailed paintings with ease.
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Sketch is drawn on the canvas

Now the artist starts to draw the subject of the painting on the canvas using the actual charcoal or a charcoal pencil. Sometimes, he may sketch with thinned paint as well.
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Oil paint is applied using paint brushes or palette knives

Now that the rough sketch is prepared, the artist is now ready to paint. Oil paint, a special paint that contains particles of pigments suspended in a drying oil (usually linseed oil), is again mixed with oil to make it thinner for applying it on the canvas. Proper consistency of the paint is maintained to avoid its breakage. The most important rule for the application of oil paint is “Fat over lean” in which the first layer of paint is thin and later, thicker layers are applied. This means that each additional layer of paint contains more oil. This results in getting a stable paint film. Traditionally, paint was applied using paint brushes but now the artists also use palette knives to create crisp strokes. To paint using this technique, the edge of the palette knife is used to create textured strokes that appear different from that of a paintbrush. Sometimes, oil paints are blended simply using fingers for getting the desired gradation.
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Smaller oil paintings, with very fine detail, are relatively easier to paint than larger ones. The most attractive feature of these paintings is the natural shiny appearance that is obtained on the surface because of the use of oil paint. The blending of colors looks extremely realistic and this is the reason why oil paintings are loved by everyone throughout the world.
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