Indrapramit Roy is a teacher, a sporadic writer, and occasionally an illustrator. He is India’s most well-known contemporary artist and is known for being inspired by the conversation between the psychological and the spatial, in which he investigates the connection between narrative components. Over the course of a three-decade career, he has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across India and abroad, from Berlin to Bangkok, London to New York.

Indrapramit Roy was born in 1964 into a family that valued the arts: his mother was a sitar player, and his father was associated with Bohurupee, the biggest Bengali premier theatre group.

It’s interesting to note that Roy went from the printmaking discipline to painting while he was still a student at Kala Bhavana Santiniketan (1982–87). Indrapramit Roy made the decision to switch from printmaking to painting in order to “capture a larger canvas of life where things happen simultaneously, like a change of scene, like a revolving stage, enabling you to move from one space to another – both literally and metaphorically.” The exploration of space has been one endeavour that has been pursued continuously. He then completed his MFA in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda (1987–89). Following that, he was given the Inlaks Scholarship to study MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in London (1990–1992), which included a term at the Cite des Arts in Paris. On an Erasmus Exchange Scholarship, he also studied for a semester in Berlin. Even if this trip and exposure have changed his artistic vocabulary, he nevertheless stays true to his innermost feelings and concerns.

Over the course of his two years, while residing at the Cholamandal Artist’s Village, his wife introduced him to Gita Wolf of Tara Books (an independent publishing house started in 1994 by Gita Wolf). Roy decided to try his hand at creating illustrations using warli techniques after hearing discussions about the lack of high-quality children’s books and illustrations.

Roy is well-known for his use of collage and mixed media. His earlier work demonstrates an interest in surfaces that could be scored, rubbed, punctured, or folded to involve a constant state of decision-making, layering, and change. Clarity appeared intermittently in particular symbols or objects that had been chosen with care, resulting in a collection of hints that admittedly had limited readability. However, his works still functioned as “repositories of memories, aspirations, dreams, and desires,” expressing a wide range of connotative or contradictory meanings.

He has turned back to painting with watercolours, imposing on himself a discipline that requires accountability for each brushstroke and minimises unplanned events. Additionally, Roy also uses text and words in his work, along with poetic snippets and his own thoughts, which he shares with us, his audience, as part of an inner dialogue.

His paintings eloquently capture deserted streets, lone trees in vast, empty fields, overcast skies, and massive unfinished high-rises at the obstinate moment when they stubbornly promise to deliver that “dream house” to live in but do not always follow through. He refers to such components in his vocabulary as “parallel moments of inconsequence” or “drama born out of the harsh and complex realities of life on the streets and wastelands of large cities.”

Roy has over 80 group exhibitions, 17 solo exhibitions, and a number of art camps and workshops under his belt. He has participated in group exhibitions in London, Berlin, New York, Melbourne, Bangkok, and Yangon. He also represented India at the Asian Art Exhibition in Macao, the Cairo Biennale, “India at 70” in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2018, and the India Art Fair in New Delhi, India, in 2019. He finished a mural (12 x 26 feet) for Terminal 2 of the Mumbai International Airport in February 2013.

He has been teaching painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda, as an Associate Professor since 1995 and as the Dean of Students since 2016. His artwork expresses a wide range of contrasting or associative meanings and serves as a repository for memories, aspirations, dreams, and desires.

He is just briefly introduced here, but in order to learn more about him and his artistic development, I chose to interview him in the last month of 2022 for this edition of Art & Deal Magazine.

Interview

Gaurav Kumar: Could you briefly describe your artistic journey?

Indrapramit Roy: Where do I begin? I think my artistic journey began at home, I was born and brought up in Calcutta. I grew up in a milieu that was full of books, theatre, and trips to art galleries and museums. I started drawing and painting at a very early age. Both my parents were very encouraging. Theatre was the first art form that I was exposed to as a young child, thanks to my father (Kumar Roy). He was an actor and then the director of the oldest surviving non-professional theatre group in India, Bohurupee (formed in 1947). He was a complete man of the theatre and believed that visual art had a major role to play in the composite art of theatre. So, I have vivid memories of visiting art exhibitions from very early days. My early exposure to visual art was mostly through illustrations and books. Bengal has a very rich tradition of book illustration. I remember keenly looking at various kinds of illustrations. Satyajit Ray’s illustrations were very influential.

So, the atmosphere at home was certainly the most conducive. Fortunately, the school I went to (Patha-Bhavan, Kolkata) also nurtured a very positive attitude towards creativity, unlike most schools. The school was loosely modelled on Tagore’s ideals, and the stress was on the joy of learning rather than excelling in only academics. I am particularly indebted to two teachers from my school. In the university, I was exposed to very different yet complimentary pedagogic models of Santiniketan, Baroda, and finally RCA, (Royal College of Art) London. So, all these shaped my journey. The first solo exhibition (CCA gallery in Delhi) I had was in 1990, just after finishing my MFA from Baroda. Subsequently, I went to study for my second Master’s at the Royal College on Inlaks scholarship and had my second solo in 1993 at Bombay’s Gallery-7. Then I moved to Chennai, to the Cholamandal artists’ village, and finally moved back to Baroda in late 1995 to start teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts of MSU, where I still teach. So, it has been a long, varied, and exciting journey with many twists and turns.

GK: You studied at the Kala Bhavana of Santiniketan, the M.S. University of Baroda, and the Royal College of Art. What distinguishes the cultures and teaching methods of these colleges from one another? How have these encounters changed you as a pedagogue?

IR: Kala Bhavana taught me to look at nature and respect history. While Baroda taught me essentially to be conscious of multiple layers of an image and to be more analytical, Santiniketan provided me with a great sense of freedom. Nature is very close to you in Santiniketan. As a city-bred boy, I would have never realised fully what the changing of the seasons meant had I not been to Santiniketan. The decision to come to Baroda was a fortuitous one. What started in Santiniketan sort of fructified in Baroda. In a way, I could see it as an extension of Santiniketan. Baroda played a role in honing the ability to be critical. The other major shift was, that I moved from printmaking to painting, which freed me from certain technical considerations that preceded a work, which I found very refreshing.

RCA was about the ‘contemporary’ and the immense exposure to art that was only known to me through books and reproductions till then. It could be electrifying to discover old art and new art simultaneously. It also clarified a lot of confusion about what I wanted to be as an artist because I learnt to defend my position. So, essentially, it gave me confidence. These are obviously generalizations, but truth be told all three places taught me to be myself in their own ways. I am a product of myriad experiences and interests, there is no easy way to pinpoint one particular impact over another because they overlap. At the risk of sounding trite, mistakes taught me a lot more than successes. The pedagogue in me is the part that is interested in sharing. I was very fortunate to have caring and stimulating teachers like Gautam Chowdhury, K.G. Subramanyan, Sanat Kar, R.Siva Kumar, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nasreen Mohamedi, Jyoti Bhatt, Rekha Rodwittiya, Peter de Francia, Paul Huxley, and a few others and I remain indebted to all of them.

GK: The year 2020 will be remembered as a year full of unprecedented experiences due to the highly infectious and hitherto unknown COVID-19 virus. What was your experience during the lockdown? Do we see some of your own experiences reflected in your artwork? If so, may they also be considered a pandemic experience document?

IR: Such cataclysmic events happen once in a century! The unprecedented hardship of people around me during the lockdown, the unfolding helplessness, the complete bewilderment, the surfeit of bad news coming from all sides, and my relatively privileged existence with a roof above my head and food on my plate, and perhaps no less importantly, the luxury of time at my disposal – I wondered, shuddered, questioned, and pondered. It is a continuous process. I can’t paint ideas but have to look for an image, what the Californian painter Wayne Thiebaud called ‘paintable’. But not everything that goes through your mind is ‘paintable,’ and perhaps that is how text became a major part of these works. I was neither interested in illustrating the text nor did I want the text to explicate the imagery. They actually exist in two different plains and run parallel to each other, hopefully setting off something unnamable.

GK: Please share with us the details of your most recent series of soliloquies and how they came to be during the unusual turn of events that is the pandemic.

The Quarantine Diaries began as a journal that I wanted to keep on a daily basis. It morphed into another set after a couple of months called Quarantine Drawings. In between, there were larger works. The Ordinary Lies, for instance, were triggered by the silence that enveloped the markers of our development paradigm—construction. The frenzy of the relentless occupation of the greens around us came to a grinding halt mid-motion. Minus all the beehive activity of humdrum construction, the stentorian skeleton became a monument to absurdity.

In the midst of it all, I chanced upon a set of drawings I did a while ago in a local cactus garden where a plethora of cacti of different genera and species were on display. Cacti in their myriad shapes and sizes are a veritable showcase of nature’s perfect geometry and design, but they also embody the principle of attraction and repulsion in equal measure. The works eponymous with the title of this show, Soliloquy, were born. All works in this show were done between 2020 and 2022.

GK: What is essential for you to convey in your artwork? What ideas or philosophies is your work built on? How did you choose the images/subjects? What is your process like? Do you have a favourite medium, and what materials or products could you not do without?

IR: I do not paint either issues or philosophies. I paint what I find eminently ‘paintable’. But of course, I am a thinking person, and the imagery has to go through a process. The ideas are all there in the work, and I don’t think they can be spoken about any more than what I have already done. Artists working over many years find their chosen areas of interest. What interests me is how the ordinary, if seen intently, can take on a different life, quite an extraordinary life, if you like. I am concerned about mood, the power of evocation, and poetry. I am interested in contradictions, paradoxes, and dark humour. I also happen to be a process-based painter, so very often the process changes the image considerably, and most times the final result surprises you. When that happens, it is pure magic.

GK: What’s your favourite piece of work you’ve produced? And why do you think you like it so much? What factors influence the price of your work?

IR: This is not for me to say. It is like asking who is your favourite offspring. Besides, when you are practising for three decades, you have gone through many phases, so even if I try to find favourites it will be a pointless exercise. As for pricing, that is decided by many factors, but It has to be sustainable.

GK: How has your interest in delving into the subtleties of visual lexicon influenced and shaped your other works, such as the “Greek Series” and “The Very Hungry Lion” illustrations for children’s books?

IR: I am not a professional illustrator, so I don’t have to work regularly with the pressure that a professional has to work with. When I illustrate, I wear a different hat from that of a painter, which is what I wear most of the time. Illustration offers me an escape into a parallel activity where I can slip out of my painter’s skin and do things that I will never do in my painting. So, for me, the challenge is how to try out something new in a particular book. Something that I have never done before. In one of my earliest books, The Very Hungry Lion, I experimented with the Worli tradition of painting. It was innocent trespassing, and I would think twice before venturing in there now. I think there are very capable Worli artists who can do it better. But at that point, the challenge was how to create a lion within the stylistic restrictions. Worli tradition has tigers but no lions. Or for that matter, how do I incorporate colour in a monochromatic painting tradition? It was fun, but I never replicated that exercise. In the next book, The Tree Girl, I was looking into the Indian miniature tradition, the one after that was a bit cartoony, and so on and so forth.

In all four of the Greek books (Antigone, King Oedipous, Bachhae and Hippolytos) were a product of researching Greek pottery and I deliberately tried to evoke that flavour. So much so that one American book critic mistook me as a Professor of Art history! I was also coming from a space informed by theatrical performances of some of these plays, which I have seen performed on stage. So, the visual lexicon was of a different kind.

GK: You appeared in the films “Ghare-Baire” (1984) and “I Woke Up One Morning and Found Myself Famous” (2010); tell us about your acting career and the events up to each role.

IR: I was always interested in acting. Had I not been a painter I could have been an actor. I have already mentioned I grew up with theatre. I have acted on stage. So, when I was chosen for the role of the young revolutionary in Ray’s The Home and The World based on a well-known Tagore novel, I was thrilled, but that never changed my conviction that I wanted to be primarily a visual artist. The film had a very long gestation period because of funding issues and also the director’s health problems. The shooting started when I just finished my 12th and was released in 1984 when I was already in the third year of my BFA studies at Santiniketan. I had to take a call after my 12^th about what I wanted to do in life and I was pretty sure that I wanted to be an artist. The so-called glamour and fandom of the film world never appealed to me. So, I took the call and never regretted it. That is all there is to it.

GK: What do you believe are the pitfalls of the negligence and flaws in the existing educational system, what do you want to inculcate in your students when you teach? How important is it to establish a strong work ethic?

IR: our education system looks at education primarily with a 19th-century mindset, you know, where reading, writing and remembering, the three R’s are the most important…and art education unfortunately does not fit into that framework. When we talk about higher education, when we define research, we are always defining it in terms of a sort of left-brain analytical activity where the written word is supreme. But here we are dealing in an area where the written word is not supreme. We are engaging in visual learning, in kinesthetic learning, in tactile learning and all kinds of things where your final outcome is not a written document or a thesis, but a work of art. That is the primary focus. I’m considering Art History but if you look at the primary focus of the Faculty it’s a practice-based place that is where the focus is. Despite the fact that the number of art departments attached to universities is increasing by the year, our education system by and large still finds this an alien concept. And because of this and also because there is a sort of bureaucratisation of education that is happening there is a lot more paperwork that is being thrust down our gullets, which I find very annoying and totally unnecessary. Every learning outcome can’t be quantified in terms of numbers and marks and such things. What is measurable is not necessarily worth measuring and what cannot be measured can be a very worthy goal. Increasingly it feels as if that which can’t be quantified in market terms is not worth pursuing. To be an artist you have to be focused, you have to have fire in the belly, you have to have patience and you have to remember why you are here. Because that’s what your calling is and you have things to say through a medium that is more personal than any mass medium. If you crave instant fame and money, then you are better off elsewhere. We want students who are aware of the world they inhabit, ready to accept challenges and believe in themselves. Those who truly believe in themselves do not get carried away by passing fads and fancies but create something that survives the test of time.

GK: In one interview with the leading newspaper, you commented that “Popular work is entertaining but does not stimulate”, I would love to know more about this thought, can you explain?

IR: It is a catchy newspaper headline that was meant to grab attention but used slightly out of context. It is not a general statement applying to anything popular. It was said in the context of popular illustrations, particularly children’s book illustrations. The popular illustrations often feed popular expectations and standards, they don’t challenge it or question it. It is often the case with art too. Popular artists often just repeat themselves to cater to market demands. So, just popularity cannot be the measuring standard of good art. What is popular today might find no-takers tomorrow but a great work of art speaks across generations, it is not just about the now and here.

GK: What do you think of the reputed Baroda School of Art? What do you think were its significant contributors to the world of contemporary art? How did you interpret the development of practice in Baroda today?

IR: The Baroda school has traditionally been associated with a rediscovery of the narrative figurative tradition of painting when the narration was suspected in high modernism. It is credited with bringing it back into the discourse and looking beyond immediate Western predecessors to mediaeval art, miniature traditions, living folk traditions, etc. It made us look at various narrative traditions of the world and debunked the myth that modern art necessarily eschews anything remotely associated with figuration and narration. The ‘Place for People’ show which Geeta Kapur (1981) curated, highlighted this very idea and cast the net well beyond the geographical locale of Baroda. What we perhaps miss in that reading is that Baroda, at the height of the narrative experiment, was also home to two very important abstractionists of our country, namely Jeram Patel and Nasreen Mohamedi. They not only continued to work but also produced the most seminal works at about the same time. There is no house style that is encouraged in Baroda. Perhaps what marks out the practice here is the willingness to make difficult choices, find one’s voice, and nurture a questioning and critical mind.

GK: What’s next? Do you have any projects on the go that are nearing fruition?

IR: No, it is a continuous process. I do not work with specific projects. Works grow out of each other, they are more like passing the baton. So, the just finished body of paintings is not an end in itself but will engender new works and those will not be a complete departure from the earlier body of works, they never are.

GK: Most readers and budding artists always make sure to look at the basic exercises. What advice would you give readers if you could, to their benefit?

IR: My only piece of gratuitous advice to budding artists would be – do what you love doing and you have fun doing and don’t bother too much about passing fads or suffer from FOMO, the fear of missing out. You need to have something genuine to communicate, but that does not necessarily mean a great philosophy, a statement, or an issue. What art is and what it does is not easy to define, and most fail when they try, so don’t bother but do ask the fundamental question from time to time—why not? That question is the mother of many new ways of problem-solving.

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