Talking of honing conventions and artistic intentions, the struggle of Gujarat’s Jain manuscript painters of the early fifteenth century comes to my mind. Their struggle equates to the struggle of Matisse for combining cubistic space with his discovered flat tectonic levels of flat colors.

An example is a page from ‘Kalakacarya Katha’ painted around the second decade of the fifteenth century. The story is about the abduction and avenging of the sister of saint Kalaka by the King of Ujjain. A sahi (scythian) King avenges and is being sermon by the saint in this page. The narrative is depicted in rectangles and horizontals. The rectangle occupied by the saint and the royal personage has a very similar artistic intention with that of Matisse. The background is crimson and the napels-yellow face of saint is in profile with the second eye projecting in the background. The bluish-pink face of the royal personage is presented in a three-forth view with full mouth and in the split representational concept. This face would have been projected much more forward than the face of the saint had it been made lighter. Since the total figure of the saint is projected much more forward, but for the overlapping figure of royal personage which,above all these layers locking, has the design over the garment which pushes back the brightness of the accouterment. The three fourths face with its projecting forth frontality is subdued by the tone and color of the body. In the left, the dominance of projection of the royal seat with the Sahi king is on the left, subdued by the breaking of the surface with the patterns and designs. Thus, the figure of the Kalakacarya becomes monumental and center of interest. Now the verticals and horizontal lines become the cardinals to give relevance to the proper surface in relation with the figure of Kalakacarya. The flat red background grips the sharp projection of the figure of Kalakacarya and secures it to the coordinates. It preserves the narrative grid.

This is how the Gujarati Jain Miniature painters play “Matisse-que” knitting of levels and facets.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Musings & Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.