Printmaking Multiple Encounters
By A. VENKAT NARAYANA
The printmakers' urge to experience and experiment with new tools is fulfilled by this Indo-U.S. exhibition and digital workshop traveling to numerous Indian cities this year
These are heady and exciting days for Indian printmakers. With the expanding art market artists are exploring new options for their visual expressions. To realize their dreams and experiment with new printmaking tools, 48 artists gathered at the American Center in New Delhi on December 29 and 30 to participate in a two-day digital prints workshop entitled "Multiple Encounters." The workshop-part of a larger event, Multiple Encounters: The Exhibition of Indo-U.S. Prints in India, 2004-2005-was cosponsored by the American Information Resource Center, a division of the Public Affairs Section of the American Embassy, where artists, both novice and established, demonstrated and finetuned their computer skills to make digital prints while sharing their experiences.
Printmaking took a big stride in the West, where it acquired the respectable status of an art form. In India, however, the medium is still in its infancy. Most Indian artists who flirted with this form of art for a while were established painters or sculptors who indulged only in conventional printmaking techniques such as lithography, wood or metal blocks, but not with digital tools. Even though there is no profound antipathy toward printmaking as an art medium, most artists, due to lack of public demand, tend to produce experimental prints and only in small editions.
Inaugurating the workshop, L.M. Singhvi, former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, said: "India is a classical example of multiple encounters. There has been cultural pluralism in the country since ages ago. But this workshop is perhaps a beginning to forge a strong cultural bonding and bring about a creative spirit between the United States and India. No one else but the artist community is equipped to bring about this transformation." He observed that this traveling group exhibition on Indo-American artists, which was recently on view in New Delhi, provides a visual feast to art lovers who can get a glimpse of Indian art. Paying tribute to the great masters of printmaking such as Raja Ravi Verma, Singhvi stated: "The prints and lithographs of masters like Ravi Verma are respected and they are prized possessions of the entire art world."
The digital workshop, which will travel to other Indian cities this year, is expected to herald a new era in Indian printmaking. "It has become a sensation among Indian printmakers, and down the line this is going to emerge as a major event," said Dipankar Roy, international director of Multiple Encounters. With the application of digital tools, countless varieties and options are available to printmakers. "This will definitely bring a huge change to printmaking. We have invited well-known painters to the workshop like Ved Nayar, Gogi Saroj Pal, Anupam Sud and Dattatrey Apte, who are occasional printmakers but have had no exposure to the digital forms. But, at the end of the day, they were tremendously excited and impressed with the new computer tools and their applications. I am sure that this effort will pave the way to promoting digital printmaking that would further the emergence of a new generation of printmakers," added Roy. The workshop helped the participants break barriers and cross over into new areas of printmaking.
The prints produced by artists at the workshop were aesthetically lively and diverse in their range, thus foiling the assumption that digital tools limit artistic improvisation. "Certain techniques were developed in the workshop to create a simultaneous process, bringing all colors onto a single 'plate' using exciting methods," says Saroj Pal, a Delhi-based painter who enjoyed working on computers. "The artist develops a tangible relationship to the material at hand even if it is a digital format," she said, adding, "I have tried and explored all media. If the print is not liked by people, it is the failure of the artist, not the medium." Echoing the same sentiment, another painter Anupam Sud expressed: "Digital medium is the real thing of the future." Hemant Bhatnagar, SPAN art director and workshop participant, feels that the digital tools offer almost unlimited options for graphic printmakers. "The computer, with features like 'Undo' and 'working on layers,' allows artists greater freedom to create and experiment as compared to the conventional tools," Bhatnagar says.
While India is struggling hard to establish itself as a major printmaking nation, its American counterparts have made many technical advances. "What the American artists have achieved from the technical standpoint, we have a long way to go to really catch up with them. Indian artists have been viewed as contributing very little to printmaking techniques even though they are quite innovative and artistically expressive. In spite of several drawbacks that we have, printmaking as an art medium is making some progress, and with the introduction of these new tools, it may reinvent itself," says Sud.
The year-long Multiple Encounters exhibition was first showcased at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Delhi last November. This traveling exhibition and the digital workshops that follow are billed as the biggest ever U.S.-India printmaking show. The organizers are planning to conduct three more workshops in Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai this year where the exhibition will also be held. This exhibition, which showcases works of 68 American and 65 Indian artists, will travel to different cities throughout India this year including Chandigarh, Srinagar, Vadodara, Bangalore, Goa, Lucknow and Ahmedabad.
Some of the other artists in the Indian contingent are Ajit Seal, K.S. Viswambara, Pramjeet Singh, Kavita Shah, Jyoti M. Bhatt, Kavita Nayar, K.R. Sibbanna and Hema Guha. The American artists include Richard Lubell, Barbara Yoshida, Frederick Mershimer, Carolyn Sheehan, Gwenn Thomas, Judith Heath and Susanna Bergtold.
Multiple Encounters aims to establish an effortless rapport between the printmakers and the common man, with digital technology providing a platform where artists encounter new challenges, experiments and expressions.