The Hand Leads the Eye Leads the Hand…

Desmond LazaroGoa Studio, 2008

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After graduating with a painting degree from the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, a Commonwealth scholarship enabled Desmond Lazaro to enrol at MSU Baroda for a Masters in 1990. Whilst there, Bannuji (the late Bannu Ved Pal Sharma, master miniature artist of Jaipur) was recommended to him by Nilima and Gulammohammed Sheikh. Lazaro became an itinerant fixture in Bannuji’s studio, serving as an apprentice off and on, for the better part of ten years. Those years in Rajasthan were decisive. In submitting to a guru and the traditions of the art of Indian studios, Lazaro found his métier and anchor.

For his PhD (2002), Lazaro studied the surviving miniature painting workshops across Rajasthan. His specialisation was the cotton painted pichhvais of the Pushtimarga sect at Nathdwara. This brought him into close contact with several masters of the art.

These masters’ studios at Nathdwara, Udaipur, Bhilwara and Jaipur have a fluctuating population of migrant artists and apprentices, paper makers, burnishers, mineral and gem stone procurers. There are pigment grinders, who prepare the ground for a painting, others who ink the outline on the final sketch, and still others who shade and colour. There are those who paint the faces and, finally, the master: he who paints the eye that gives life to the painting. In his years spent studying the tradition, Desmond participated in each of the different processes.

In Lazaro’s work today, we see two separate traditions at play. One is the traditional Indian system with its own universe of practitioners, community, methods and motivations, and the other is the ‘tradition’ of modern art. The dichotomy in the two is significant. One lays emphasis

The hand leads the eye leads the hand…

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on the celebrity of the individual painter who is expected to articulate a new and original style, while the other expects a process to be followed, the resulting works of which serve the temple and its pilgrims, ideally without care for signatures. The pichhvai tradition expects the art to be narrative, or to fulfil a devotional purpose. The modernist painter in Lazaro, however, is programmed to emphasise the individual, ‘secular’ image. One must naturally expect him to be unable to keep the two worlds separate. And by combining the stereotypes of both, Lazaro drives us to create a different point of view from which to appreciate his work.

The practicalities of running a traditional painting studio in a contemporary climate are equally part of this tricky dichotomy. The studio cannot function single-handedly. Pigments have to be made, as do the papers, cloth, preparatory filling in of backgrounds, etc. This demands a complex and subtle relationship of power and exchange between the main artist/head of a studio and the others who provide services of varying degrees of labour and creativity.

The khadi - cotton cloth - used for the large works in this exhibition is the traditional material for pichhvais. It has a particularly close weave, enabling the pigment paint to form a flat even surface, much like on paper. Initially the cloth is starched onto a board with arrowroot (the traditional binder). At the end of each day, provided the painted surface of the cloth is dry, it can be pulled off the board and either strung up or rolled away. The sheets of paper are handmade by Zakir Husain of Sanganer, Rajasthan. The paper pulp is made from 100% cotton rag, a method dating back to early Mughal / Iranian traditions and akin to Japanese paper making. Individual sheets are ‘lifted’ with a bamboo stretcher from a vat of cotton pulp, and are placed onto a wall and air dried. Once dry, each sheet is hand burnished with a large

goti – an agate stone attached to wooden handle – on a semi-circular wooden frame, to polish the paper and make it ready for painting.

Jaipur has been the trading city for gem stones and minerals for centuries. Our contemporary political vicissitudes notwithstanding, quantities of lapis, malachite, indigo, azurite, cinnabar, lac, kaolin, conch shells et al are still traded along the same ancient routes from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka to be made available in the Jaipur markets. Lazaro’s technique of painting, be it on cloth or paper, follows the traditional methods of miniature and pichhvai painting. He prefers to classify pigments into four principal types based on how they are derived (as opposed to their colour alone): semi-precious mineral stones, organic, alchemical and earth. They are all carefully prepared by hand according to traditional methods of production.

Semi-precious pigments are made from mineral rocks and stones extracted from the earth. These are commonly known as ‘stone colours’, such as blue: lazwardi (lapis lazuli), green: danafrang (malachite), white: kharia (chalk white), orange: desi sindoor, red: hinglu (vermilion cinnabar). Organic pigments are made from plants, animals or insects, and are known as lake or dye colours (for example, blue: neel (indigo), red: lak (lake lac), turmeric (haldi) yellow). Alchemical pigments are made by chemical process (white: safida/jasta (lead white), green: zangal (verdigris), orange: sindoor (minium). Earth pigments are made from soft earth deposits (for example, yellow: ramraj (yellow ochre), red: geru (red ochre). In Lazaro’s studio, one assistant is employed full-time in the production of pigments. Mention must also be made of Chitarmal Kumawat, a Jaipuri miniature painter who is best described as Lazaro’s foreman. Sourcing supplies of gemstones and other raw materials, ensuring that each


constituent member of the studio is exploited to his optimum creative satisfaction, administering and managing the people and commodities involved in this collaborative act and yet retaining his own status as principal artist is a complex tightrope for Lazaro. These relations have to be founded on respect, love and a shared commitment to the act of painting.

Lazaro says his work ten to 15 years ago was inspired by Frank Auerbach’s large canvases with expressionistic, free-flowing, rapid and dramatic swathes of oil on canvas. He also remains inspired by David Hockney and the ‘Kitchen-sink painters’ of 1950s London exalting the minutiae of everyday in vivid colour. Like Auerbach’s work, Lazaro’s sketches were carefully built up, almost making visible the ghosts of previous versions of the drawing. Somewhere in this melange of lines, one’s eye settled on the form being portrayed. This technique is, however, aesthetically antithetical to the tradition of miniature painting, in which a single clean deft line captures the essence of the form or portrait. In adherence with this technique, in 1997, Lazaro departed from the Auerbach mode in his line work and sketches, although he remains a fan of tonal variations and thick layerings of paint in his work.

Even before he met Bannuji, Lazaro had already started making sketches of miniatures and pichhvais, captivated by the colour, detail, composition, and by the idea of Krishna and by his seeming absence in those pichhvais which substitute him for a tree. The exposure to traditional or desi colours was to be a transformative experience. It put Lazaro on the road to finding his calling: as he learnt the art, so too did he have to develop and adopt a different quality of line.

In 1997, Lazaro completed a second Masters degree, this time at the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture in Visual, Islamic and Traditional Art. In this study, his experiences in Rajasthan

were given a formal focus. His professor Keith Critchlow’s views on sacred geometry became a fundamental inspiration through which Lazaro began to formally approach not just pichhvais, but all painting. The college’s ideas are built on the philosophical works of William Morris, Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Ananda Coomaraswamy and have their foundations in Platonism and the Perennial philosophy. The college espouses the virtue of traditional handcrafted art and its spiritual and civilizational values, as opposed to mass-produced or industrialised work. Critchlow’s Kairos -Foundation for the recovery of traditional values in art and science continues to promote these principles. For many years after he completed his second Masters, Lazaro worked in the traditional vein producing pichhvais and wrote a PhD published in 2005 titled as ‘Materials, Methods & Symbolism in the Pichhvai Painting Tradition of Rajasthan’ (Mapin, India). The book illustrates practical aspects of the art, from iconography to colour symbolism and geometry to pigment preparation.

While apprenticed to traditional masters, Lazaro’s work was faithful to the iconography and techniques of the pichhvais. His early independent projects also show adherence to the same iconography. In time, his pichhvais became more elaborate and grander in scale, in one case taking over a year to complete. At the same time, he also began deconstructing the elements of the pichhvai, isolating them and producing a large number of sections of pichhvais as complete

From left to right (details)1.Govardhan drawing

26 X 38 inchesPigment paint on handmade

paper

2. Govardhan Painting 26 x 38 inches

Pigment paint on handmade paper

3. Govardhan Painting26 x 38 inches

Pigment paint on handmade paper

4. Shri Nathji 48 x 96 inches

Pigment paint on fine cotton cloth

CHECK THE LEADING IN FIRST PARA IMAGE OF SHREENATHJI TO REPLACE


Train StationMonochromatic details

107 x 71.5 inches

works. These focussed usually on Krishna’s cows, but could also be just the gopis or just a part of Shrinathji’s face. These works mark the first main departure in Lazaro’s work, and begin to show the graphic sensibility that has become the cornerstone of his work today. At about the same time, Lazaro’s exposure to Pahari painting made him rapidly assimilate its compositional aesthetic. New ideals and mentors emerge: Nainsukh’s loving clean lines, controlled and restricted palette and ability to disguise the most exacting artistic practice in seemingly clean and simple works.

Looking at the paintings in this exhibition without taking into view the entire body of his work, critics may well argue that they lack originality in spirit and composition. They are not as detailed as you would expect from a finely trained miniature painter, they may say, and he works from photographs. But to limit response to this alone misses the point. Although Lazaro’s work starts with bold brushstrokes, it always comes down to the tiniest of brushes in the end. This brings the work back to being a detailed miniature, lending it the necessary breath of life to take it away from being a photographic work. His academic, subtle and controlled shading and extraordinary quality of pigment create tonality that sucks light in. He further limits his already limited palette to take the viewer to a heightened level of aesthetic narcissism. He appears to work along the dictum that less is more. And, certainly in the massive paintings on cloth, for example as in the one of the moving red train, one is brought face-to-face before a certain trompe l’oeil pictorial illusionism: the viewer has a productive existence rather than being a passive voyeur.

It goes without saying that Lazaro chooses to photograph certain things, typical objects of small town and urban India, isolated from their context. Most of the work in this exhibition focuses on a vehicle from the ’70s or vignettes typical of India: the slightly old verdigris Vespa, a rusting white

Ambassador, the clichéd auto-rickshaw, the small roadside Ferris wheel style jhula, a bicycle, the vendor bearing his basket of goods on his head, juxtaposed against the mass produced plastic chair. In this body of work, Lazaro’s vision is not so much Orientalist as derived from the ‘Kitchen-Sink’ ideals. He makes precious and valorises the everyday, and the relics of an India that is fast disappearing. The selective isolation of an element suspended in an eternal space makes it trapped as if for inspection, for delectation. The open space invites the viewer to enter and live within, alongside the relic of what was once everyday, but has now been made precious in gemstone colour. The unfinished portions of the paintings invite the viewer to participate in its process and method. The ideas and themes are played out, and Lazaro’s sophistication comes out in doing it all rather well. He paints what amuses him and with an aesthetic that he strongly holds on to in all aspects of his life. These are images that appeal to him spontaneously and intrinsically. And, in my conversations with him, I discovered that subconsciously behind them lies a compelling personal story. The first ambassador car he painted was his son Emile’s toy. His wife Agathe, drove one around Delhi when they first met. The work of this craftsman then is led by his hand as much as the work of this artist is led by his eye: the method is in harmony with the medium and the inspiration.


Lazaro’s work for this exhibition can be broken broadly into two types. The first makes mundane objects into precious artefacts, their preciousness enhanced by his use of pure jewel colours. The second group are more recent works. These have movement and narrative. The earlier works are more the things he loves about India: objects that are for you as the viewer, and for him as a painter, precious spaces to see. The second set, are spaces to be, spaces which he inhabits, where the colour and form of India is not enough, but is the space in which he contemplates and negotiates a life.

Lazaro says: “In these new works I continue to employ traditional techniques in a craftsman like manner through the stringent preparation of all my materials: cloth, paper, brushes and pigment colours. These materials are an integral part of the process of painting. However, by the changing the imagery, ‘context and meaning’ inevitably shift. The pichhvai scale continues although the iconography moves from the sacred to the secular; rusting cars, shards of modern life, modernity itself is animated, suspended in the miniature format. The personal narrative shuffles miniature paintings of the Jahangir period – those psychological portraits of people and animals – to memories of the industrial urban landscape of my childhood. In both, the often-discarded moments, people and places, ordinary and everyday things, become elevated and transmuted”.

There is a journey from the early to the new paintings. The direction Lazaro wants to take his work now is to motion and narrative. The man in the Union Jack tee-shirt behind the fence was a specific instance that Lazaro photographed. It speaks to him at multiple levels: personal / public, Indian / non-Indian. The protagonist is actually a bricklayer on the other side of the green grass. It is an image about what is happening to Indians today. But again, it is also autobiographical. Anglo- Indian, he is part of each but not included wholly in any one country. The fence is equally about class and place.

‘The Fall’ came about after thinking about close friends, secure on the outside, but actually falling off their seats of reason and being. Lazaro rehearsed the moment and Chitarmal took the photo of him falling. In the sketch, The Fall captures that moment when you are suspended – just hanging in there – when you don’t know where or if or how you are going to fall. A state of suspended animation. The suspension is personal as much as it is sociological. Lazaro goes to the extent of saying: “It’s also about the falling of the man, and the second coming of the age of the feminine to replace that”. This is an idea that he feels characterises our times when we must accept our fragile state of suspension between one social order and an unknown other world.

Locating himself in this fragile utopia, we understand the portrait of him balancing on the precipice of letting go and falling off his moulded plastic chair. In the next work, we actually see that he lets go and allows himself to fall. And when he falls, he is cushioned by the mattress which is Indian. For Lazaro this is about faith that underlies his practice: “I paint because I love it”. And, being one with it without worry, he is reinforced by the faith that if you ‘fall from the cliff, the angels will catch you’.

Naman P. AhujaAugust, 2008

Naman P. Ahuja is the associate professor of Indian Art, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi


Ambassador III, 200725 x 34 inches

Kharia (fine chalk white), Safida (zinc white oxide), Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine ash), Kajal (lamp black), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Ranga (tin/mica) & Chandi (shellac silver paint) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Bike and drape, 200825 x 34 inches

Peori Light (chrome yellow), Kharia (fine chalk white), Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine dark), Desi Neel (colbolt blue), Neel (indigo), Kajal (lamp black), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Ranga (tin/mica), Chandi (silver paint), Sindoor (minium) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Lapis scooter , 200825 x 34 inxhes

Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine dark)), Desi Neel (colbolt blue) Kajal (lamp black), Kharia (fine chalk white), Chandi (shellac silver

paint) & Dhumsa(smoke brown)on handmade Sanganeer paper

Malachite scooter , 200825 x 34 inches

Danafrang (malachite), Kajal (lamp black), Sindor (mi-nium), Kharia (fine chalk white) & Dhumsa (smoke brown) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Man with basket, 2008105 x 76.5 inches Zangal (verdigris), Kharia (fine chalk white), Safida (zinc white oxide),Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine dark), Hinglu (cinnabar), Desi Neel (colbolt blue),Kajal (lamp black), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Ram Raj (yellow ochre), Ranga (tin /mica) & Sindoor (minium) on fine cotton cloth


Jhula III , 200825 x 34 inch

Harabhata (terra verte), Desi Sindor (orange), Dhumsa (smoke brown), chinese ink , Kharia (fine chalk white)on handmade Sanganeer paper


Jula I, 200725 x 34 inches

Harabhata (terra verte), Danafrang (malachite), Ram Raj(yellow ochre), Desi Sindor (orange), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white) & Geru (indian red) on handmade Sanganeer paper

Jula II , 200725 x 34 inches

Hinglu (cinnabar), Ram Raj (yellow ochre), Desi Sindor (orange), Peori (yellow chrome light), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white) & Geru (indian red) a on handmade Sanganeer paper


Pondy the workers blue Jeep, 200825 x 34 inches

Lapiz Lazuli (ultramarine ash), Desi Neel (colbolt blue), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white) & Chandi (shellac silver paint) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Pondy the Tamil Truck , 2008108 x 72 inches

Neel (indigo), Robin Blue (french ultramarine), Lapis Lazuli (ultrama-rine light), Desi Neel (colbolt blue), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white), Danafrang (malachite), Kajal (lamp black) & Peori (yellow chrome dark) on handmad Sanganeer paper


Udaipur Taxi Bus, 200825 x 34 inches

Kajal (lamp black), Neel (indigo), Lapis Lazuli (ul-tramarine light), Peori (yellow chrome dark), Hinglu (cinnabar), Dhumsa (smoke brown) & Kharia (fine chalk white) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Udaipur Tonga , 200825 x 34 inches

Danafrang (malachite), Desi sindor (orange), Harabhata (terra verte),Peori (yellow chrome dark), Hinglu (cinnabar), Neel (in-digo), Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine ash), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white), Kajal (lamp black) & Chandi (silver paint) on handmad Sanganeer paper


Man and Dog, 2008105 x 62 inches

Kajal (lamp black), Geru (indian red),Dhumsa (smoke brown), Desi Neel (colbolt blue), -Kharia (fine chalk white) & graphite pencil on fine cotton cloth


Ricksaw Walla Sleeping, 200825 x34 inches

Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine light), Geru (indian red), Kajal (lamp black), Dhumsa (smoke brown) & Kharia (fine chalk white) on handmade Sanganeer paper


PHOTOGRAPHS &TO REPLACE

Bike and Ladder, 200825 x 34 inches

Geru (indian red), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white), Kajal (lamp black), Burnt Umber & Desi Neel (colbolt blue) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Bicycle in market, 200825 x 34 inches

Kajal (lamp black), Hinglu (cinnabar), Chandi (shellac silver paint) & Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine ash) & Graphite pencil on handmade Sanganeer


FallingLeft .

107 x 71.5 inches Right .

47.5 x 71.5 inches

Hinglu (cinnabar), Kajal (lamp black), Sindor (minium), Dhumsa (smoke

brown) & grapite pencil on fine cotton cloth


The Fall II 2008107 x 71.5 inches

Hinglu (cinnabar),Kajal (lamp black), Sindor (miniumDesi Sindor (orange),Dhumsa (smoke brown) & grapite pencil on fine cotton cloth


Union Jack, 2008 25 X 34 inches

Danafrang (malachite), Hinglu (cinnabar), Desi sindor (orange), Harabhata (terra verte), Peori (yellow chrome dark), Hinglu (cinnabar), Neel (indigo), Lapis Lazuli (ultra-marine ash), Dhumsa (smoke brown) & Kharia (fine chalk white) on handmade Sanganeer paper


Train Station, 2008 107 x 71.5 inches

Hinglu (cinnabar), Neel (indigo), Lapis Lazuli (ultramarine ash), Dhumsa (smoke brown), Kharia (fine chalk white), Safida (zinc white oxide),Chandi (shellac silver paint) on fine cotton cloth


The Hand Leads the Eye Leads the Hand…

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