art and chocolate

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IMPORTANT NOTE:

[During this phase, I had two eyes. I lost one of the eyes in an accident before beginning of 2nd phase of my art career. So there is a difference in my way of painting before and after. This phase shows how an artist with both good eyes would see depth/volume & translate them in works of visual art. All the phases after this one show how a one-eyed artist would struggle to invent a feeling of depth via juxtaposition of conflicting/contrasting elements. For full explaining statement, read it at the beginning of the post about phase 3.]

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My drawings, at least in the beginning, were concerned with emptiness and desolation. This feeling is a personal one. I found the image of a bat in a forlorn room an effective symbol of this. A bat hanging from a ceiling forebodes helplessness and death. When it flaps about blindly in a room, it carries this feeling with it.

The image of a bat, a small living thing with enormous wrappings led me into other metamorphic forms. These combined them in a way that showed a struggle between the inert and the active. This led me in its turn to pictures of erotic combat, sometimes combining the sensual and the brutal. I have probably tried to dramatize through these a feeling of personal desolation. I have probably tried to make a general comment to an environment which is a thing to us. We struggle to be a part of it but not be a thing ourselves. I am aware of an inherent contradiction like this in life, even the erotic.

My drawings have been so far quite personal, but of late, I have wanted to pull myself out of it into a distance and be a watcher not a party.

-Vinod Dave on his early works from 1975 – 1981

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Vinod Dave’s confiding note on his drawings is illuminating. It is disturbingly frank, as are his drawings. Handling a vast variety of forms – the bat, the nude, the disembodied garment – Dave’s delineation is so clear and aggressive, so sudden and striking in confrontation as visual images, that the drawings command immediate attention and respect. The anatomical details are rendered with fine observation and a revealing skill.

Some his works refer to the erotic but manage to avoid portraying the sensual or the sensuous. Dave does this by incorporating graphic elements or themes which make the drawings portray frustrations or mania. Compositions based on the forms of the bat imply and suggest the elastic , nervous power symbolized by this creature.

There is a genuineness about these images, a powerful but controlled statement and an unorthodoxy which mark Vinod Dave as a young artist of considerable talent.

-Richard Bartholomew

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One is immediately struck by Vinod Dave’s skill as draughtsman and painter. He reveals a sure and masterly grasp of pencil and paint. There is a fluidity and ease in the execution of his works, the dexterity and supple grace of the accomplished artist. Art comes naturally to him, it is his element.

But technique apart, Dave has developed a personal imagery which is compelling, with forms as persistent as figures in a dream. They are an assault on the senses, a nightmarish vision of the vampires, dismembered bodies, scattered remains, emptied skins juxtaposed with the cold crystalline hardware of modern life. They are painted with a meticulous almost obsessive realism, reassembled in a relationship which cast the hypnotic spell of the chimera. These disturbing convulsive transfigurations create a Kafkaesque fantasy, suffused in an atmosphere of sinister menace, the corporal elements seemingly victims in an infernal drama.

The drawings have the clinical assurance of the surgeon’s knife. While the pencil exults in the human form, tracing the rounded contours of the body with the lascivious scars, it explores with an unabashed sensuality and limitless curiosity the remotest regions. Side by side with the disjointed images of startling beauty we have the polished gloss of putrefaction, of the bulbous shapes, of tissues tainted with the settling hues of decay.

Whatever the morals of these works, they are evidence of a creative imagination of uncommon power.

-Ebrahim Alkazi

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We experience hard realities, the stresses in society and the nature of sleep, the sensuous repose of the body, its physical abandon, and the psychic state of the dream when experience is metamorphosed and memory is recast and experienced subliminally as a symbolic narrative while looking at work of Vinod Dave. His work projects both these areas of sensibility, often coalescing the two. The result is real enough to be of this world of phenomenal things and fantastic also in the way that the images are “arrested” images, phased in the rhythm and movement of the dream.

We see this distinctly in the series of drawings depicting a dog on the prowl. By changing the background, which engenders the mood, the expression changes from the sinister to the sad. In a sequence of frames the dog, despite being depicted in the same posture, appears to move on as the eye admits its representative-ness and the mind takes into account its progression.

This lone dog for all its forward thrust is a metamorphosed image. One leg seems rooted, planted, as though animal life were drawing substance from vegetative earth. The cycle is complete, with the dog asleep, under a bed, besides a blanketed figure – both creatures of this world, and out of it as well, at the same time.

Vinod Dave’s other recurring theme is the female nude. Depicted in varying degrees of delineation – sensuously graphic and exquisitely modeled as in the drawings – or transposed and transformed as in the paintings where figure and prop are surreal presences – the nude is the personification of the sleep world, sleep as a sexual encounter and sleep as the drama in the dream.
-Richard Bartholomew

One would also wish to see the artist's photography & drawing HERE

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PHASE-1

PHASE-3

PHASE-4

IMPORTANT NOTE:

[Starting with this phase, my way of seeing has changed due to loss of one of my eyes in an accident. So all works in all the phases starting this one are affected by my vision without spatial depth. As I have explained in my statement in phase 3, works from now on are depicted with an "invented" way of seeing depth - rather a feeling of depth that is achieved by "fooling" my eye. Please observe that my way of painting is clearly different now on compared to the previous phase. The major difference is that of an illusion of depth and the three dimensional modelling & rendering of shapes in the early phase as opposed to the flat masses & fluidly painted areas juxtaposed with hard-edged geometrical shapes, marks-making & text to "create" fooling feeling of depth. For full statement, please find it at the beginning of the post about phase 3.]

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We each morning read and “digest” bad news with breakfast, mostly of violence of humans against humans, while we sit at our breakfast table. Reacting to that, my work involves manipulated re-photography of socially violent news-images in a way that makes the photograph, ‘frozen’ by a photojournalist’s camera, ‘melt’ again to convey a powerfully expressionistic statement about the hard world of relativity that one faces in contemporary global society. Part painting, part photograph, largely dark toned mixed-media work, at first looks like an interestingly patterned abstract pastiche; its figures taken from the news media provide an allegorical puzzle. The puzzle is soon solved with the discovery of my pre-occupation with violence, a violence that can not be categorized and that charges the whole of living. The photographs of a daily variety of ‘human made violence’ juxtaposed with purposeful slashes and strokes punctuate the composition with broken shards and a fragmented imagery that blend, one into the other, regardless of time and form. The news photograph aligned and juxtaposed with slashes and borders of color refer to the human condition. Taken out of context of black and white boxes of columns, print and headlines, the photograph now takes its reference from and has its energy in suggestive potentiality of color.

-Vinod Dave on his news photo based works from 1981 – 1991

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Vinod Dave’s work is informed with an unusual perception and a unique sensitivity to his medium. His work is imbued with a strong emotional intensity which is rendered means of rich color sense that speaks of both Western and Eastern influences. The intensity of his artistic voice speaks to everyone.

His The Green Empire of Her Psychosis, certainly recalls the Western collage tradition beginning with the work of Kurt Schwitters and continuing to Dada photographer Hans Bellmer. The composition as a whole alludes to the decorative planarity of Rajput and Mewar miniature, while the surface graffiti recalls tribal wall paintings, such as produced by the Warli painters. The reclining nude repoussoir figure recalls both the legion of the Western odalisques as well as the sensuous sacred figures of Eastern religious sculpture. Dave’s choice of the photographic medium finds its source in late Victorian portraits copied from photographs, or actually painted upon them. Commenting about these palimpsest images, Stuart Cary Welch states, “Such was their skill that it is often challenging to be sure whether or not some paintings are fundamentally what they seem.” The same could be said about Vinod Dave’s work.

-Thomas Sokolowski

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The magic fiery nature of modern-day Indian art is lighting up two galleries and a corridor at the Worcester Art Museum. Blazing colors, abstract imagery but also delicately drawn figures mark this show, the second the museum is devoting to contemporary Indian art. The oldest is Msqbool Fida Huasain. In this show, it is not Husain but Vinod Dave who carries the day. Dave’s mixed-media works light up the museum’s Fountain Gallery with their brilliant color schemes. Like an old master painter, he uses lots of bright reds and deep greens and other warm hues to focus attention on his collage-like scenes. Surrounding areas are in subdued hues or semi-darkness. His imagery is composed out of different objects. People, animals, architectural elements and scenes from contemporary life are joined into an electrifying whole. There is an unreal character to it, as if the artist has joined flashes from dreams in an effort to piece together the complete story. His imagery is expressive and powerful and cleverly combines reality with abstract. The impact is heightened by the scale of the works even though Dave shows himself no less effective in his smaller mixed-media works.

-Peter Donker