Twelve people from different walks of life came together in Sayanee Sarkar's workshop at Emami Art. The workshop was a collateral event aimed at sharing the process that animates her debut solo – Alchemy of Absolute Intimacy.
Her paintings stand somewhere between figuration and abstraction; and in the workshop, she shared how she went about doing them, nudging the attendees to try out the technique for themselves. Using an image/photo for reference.
It was a layered process that they explored in 3 steps:
- First, doing a preparatory (very rough) sketch with pencil on drawing paper.
- Next, in the intermediate stage, trying a coloured version with acrylic on water-absorbent paper.
- And then, executing the final version on raw canvas.
Before the workshop, Sayanee spoke briefly about her practice, and after the sketching part, did a partial walkthrough, pausing before selected works to illustrate a point or answer a query. She said this is her debut workshop, but conducted it with confidence and warmth, pushing those with an artistic flair and encouraging the ones doubting and diffident about their work, ultimately helping each participant realize his/her idea.
It was a motley group, ranging in age from an early teen to a middle-aged woman who had never held a brush in her life before! But more than the age-group, it was the varied backgrounds they came from that attested to the wide appeal of Sayanee's art: with not just the predictable art students, of which there were 3 (studying MFA, BFA, and about to start college, respectively); but also an Engineering (Arch) student, a doctoral scholar of philosophy, a designer, an ad filmmaker, a screen-writer (who has recently tasted success with a Zee5 hit), and a teacher of Sociology.
They all came ready with an image that they hoped would "trigger" their artwork. Sayanee's process, in her own words, "begin(s) with fragmenting the lines (of an image) and tearing down the composition on a piece of paper". Ironically, this was the step that was the most difficult to do, as she was asking the participants to deconstruct the image they had chosen when the normal tendency is to build up the component parts and aim at replication. The change of mediums - both, with which and on which the artwork was being created - was not easy to handle either. But, like in any group, some got the hang of it faster and did a better job than others.
A striking feature of Sayanee's paintings is their predominantly monochromatic palette: each artwork is suffused with a particular colour - yellow, pink, blue, grey, brown - different shades of which dissolve into each other. The effect is dreamlike, with the form and background merging; and the viewer is left guessing not only the context but also the nature of the intimacy hinted at in the foggy impressions on the canvas. It is this indeterminacy of meaning and liminality of form that the workshop participants were trying to grasp and, in turn, employ in their own tentative attempts.
According to the artist, everyone succeeded!