Awe-inspiring wells on huge canvases stir emotions

Referring to Gieve Patel's 'Wells' series, distinguished Indologist-linguist David Shulman says: "Sooner or later, if you keep coming back to the painting, you can't help but feel that it is looking at you. In some canvases, in fact, the well looks uncannily like a huge, convex eye staring at you from some nearby vantage point. We know of such experiences:

Rilke wrote a famous poem about them, ‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo’, ending with the words: ‘There is no point/ that does not see you. You must change your life.’ Many great works convey precisely this demand on the viewer. You are being observed, as if by a living being that inhabits the space of the canvas, which is anything but flat, just as the mirror is never two-dimensional.

It's now a different kind of mirror that we have before us: not simply an infinite, generative reservoir, a plenitude of being, but an active, seeing mirror which just happens to have taken you in. Here the act of generating forms is already past; textures and shapes already exist, as if imprinted by the world on the eye that is staring at the world.

The vertigo we were feeling before gives way to an eerie sense that we are not alone. But whose eye is it? And how does it happen that there are also spaces, objects, realities outside the eye? You were looking down into the well, and now you discover that the well calmly examines you, knowing you to be both inside and outside it. In the light of that scrutiny, subtle shades capture your attention—magenta, dusty green, airy blue; they move lightly through the domain of the well, unstable, not quite at home. They move you.

In 'A Spray of Blossoms' the well itself is strangely disembodied, ethereal, as if floating in space, not rooted in the earth. Never was a well so enchanting and so unwell-like. By now the depth is all surface—a metaphysical resolution of our problem. No wonder Gieve Patel paints wells on such huge canvases. Indeed, the longer one looks at them wells, the more free surface becomes apparent, as if the truly compelling business of seeing were somehow taking place there, where no image comes into focus and where the well can see you best."

(Excerpted from David Shulman's essay,On Wells and Clouds; courtesy The Guild)