offbeat

Be a Cow to Paint Grass

A young artist Mahesh Baliga was initiated into art by a local icon painter. Later he joined Chamarajendra Academy for Visual Arts (CAVA). His works resonate with the rhythm of the immediate and he draws inspiration from his surroundings. Adding a pinch of humor, Mahesh transforms the quotidian into surreal. This surrealism is not a direct outcome of his subconscious meanderings. He shares his process and experience of creating one of his major works.

This is one of my favorite paintings and would love to talk about it. I always try to think about the image and its meaning, meaning and the word and the word and the image.    One day I was sketching outdoors, I was unaware of the colour of the pencil which I was using .After the drawing was finished there was a red cow drawn on the paper. This looked like flesh .It got me a new idea to paint. During this time I was thinking about mundane environment and to paint that which is not noticed or represented. By this time as I started with canvas, the main concern was how to paint.

Repeated attempts were made to solve the problems. I made small drawings come from the little thoughts. The grass that I painted overlapped the cow’s face, on the otherside there is a human figure over the grass, the figure has a gesture which is blurred.  The shape of the grass connects both the cow and the man. The grass was painted with small patches of colour and this made it look brittle/ pixilated. The paint is impasto and the painting overall has a drawing quality.

On the background there are two cows grazing a drawing of a grass (like in a children’s drawing book) and it has a strong symmetry which makes the grass as if it is a circle. This gives the painting a perspective.

I thought of keeping a template just like the paintings in a museum have. But this has an x-ray image of the same painting. The details are not being seen in the bigger one but in the smaller one just like an x-ray plate. Here the light got inversed and the re-representation of a representation happened. With a black glass on it the template somewhat looks like an object.

The small scale of the template makes you come closer to view it and the scale of the painting on the canvas makes you move at a distance and see both, there occurs a physical experience. I tried to write without conclusions because the title says everything.