‘The Art of Drawing’ at the Guild

The Guild, Mumbai presents ‘The Art of Drawing’ curated by Sudhir Patwardhan, a preview of a two-part show at Sudarshan Art Gallery, Pune. Its purpose is to bring together some of the different kinds of drawing done by Indian artists today.

Works by the artists Dilip Ranade, Gieve Patel, Himmat Shah, Jyothi Basu, K.G. Subramanyan, Krishen Khanna, Parag Tandel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Tushar Joag and Vilas Shinde have been chosen with a view to give the viewer some sense of the variety of ways in which drawing is still used as a tool of exploration, and as a mode of expression.

An accompanying note by artist-curator, Sudhir Patwardhan elaborates: “The impulses behind drawing, the reasons why artists draw, are multiple and varied, and the drawings that result from such varied impulses look very different from each other. A studied rendering of a model in the studio is different from a quickly rendered sketch of a figure seen in the street. An idle doodle is different from a charged venting of emotion on paper.

Drawings done to clarify a vague idea in the mind are different from drawings done to abstract the essential forms in nature; and the list can be as long as the number of artists who do drawings. However, till not too long ago, the activity of doing some form of drawing daily was considered essential for every artist. It was part of the discipline of being an artist and was considered the foundation on which an artist built. It was essential for keeping the connections between eye, brain and hand alive and alert.

In the last few decades drawing seems to have lost this generally accepted eminence in the creative process. Firstly, with the spread of photography from the beginning of the twentieth century, the reign of one kind of naturalistic or academic drawing came to an end. Nevertheless, drawing still flourished in the modern period.

Artists found new uses for and purpose for drawing. And the forms that drawings took multiplied. In the past twenty years or so however, with the advent of the new media in art - video, photography, installation etc. and the spread of the computer in design and architecture, drawing seems to have receded somewhat from artists’ practice. Its position in the academic curriculum too is unstable and its need is not universally felt,” the curator states.