Art Education: What No One Told You
Yasra Daud Khoker

The philosophy and art of Shishir Bhatt forms the adumbration of the emblem of
self-education. Making art for over 30 years, and having learned through self-enquiry
and exploration, he believes that the universe is designed for the learner. With nobody
to guide him, Shishir depended on his instincts and painted his way through art. His art
education began when he ran errands for artists, served them tea and, in the process,
watched their swift hand movements until they were ingrained in his mind and soon, he
was making natural colour pigments, mounting paper on board, painting large areas of
uniform colour, until there was nothing left for him to try.
Since then, he has been engrossed in translating the grotesque realities of routine
life into surrealist voyages that reveal a parallel universe at a minute scale, where one is
pulled into deeper fractals of meaning and parody. The curse of a mundane and prosaic
city life conjures into whimsical and capricious strokes, arbitrarily morphing a sharp,
rectilinear element into coiling twirls of hypnosis.
Perception is the key to Shishir Bhatt’s work and his subjects are derived from around
him. Years of practice in training the eye to see reality in value and colour, and building
the illusion on a flat surface led him to experiment with photo-realistic art. Sometimes,
he is asked to leave the work incomplete, to preserve its hand-drawn quality. “A work
of photo-realistic art reaches it’s zenith when it closely resembles the reality captured
in an image. After spending long hours and producing such work, the most fulfilling
comment would be, ‘This looks like a photo’ and after a while, it stopped exciting me as
an artist. That is when I decided to paint the unreal, the nebulous, the fantastical.”
Observation is the key, and as simple as it sounds, it is the first step to recording
reality through the hand. Art is a way for the self to be excited, which is possible when
our surroundings inspire us. Today, consumption has rendered everything disposable
and people have lost the ability to look laterally, to see the car in a brick tied to a piece
of string, to see the rainbow in marbles, and to calibrate the eye to see the charm in
daily living. “Hard work without intention, meaning or direction is just mechanical
work. Art is the end result of hard work coupled with a vision, a sense of purpose”, says
Shishir Bhatt. Painting for 14 to 20 hours at a stretch, his neighbours have never seen
him, and as I leave his studio, he continues working on his painting, humming songs by
K.L.Sehgal, unperturbed by time, visitors or others’ opinions.