In the wash

V Ramesh's print, wash, re-print technique perfectly articulates his philosophical concerns.

Watercolour on paper is not a very popular medium among contemporary Indian artists, not the least because it can be a tricky medium requiring some degree of skill and patience. It’s also not a medium for large works, or so artists and gallerists will tell you, being best suited for finer effects and delicate washes on a smaller scale. V Ramesh turns all such conventional wisdom on its head.

For one, all the 34 works, watercolours and gouaches on paper, that this senior artist from Vishakhapatnam is currently exhibiting at the Threshold Gallery in Delhi are large format — nearly 4’-6’ by 3’-4’. Two, these are not paintings that depend upon flat colours and broad strokes to work their effect, as one would have expected of such large works. Instead, these are full of subtle effects, fine details, and nuanced textures.

Take “an illustrated poem”, which represents what looks like a chain mail in black with a human heart, its aortas and ventricles delineated with as much physiological detail as in a biology textbook diagram, showing through in stark red. Each metal ring in the wire mesh is carefully and perfectly replicated, so carefully and perfectly that it’s almost photograph-like. (Ramesh’s paintings of Ramanna Maharshi and carnatic singer Sanjay Subrahmanyam actually use photographs.)

This is because Ramesh does not paint the conventional way with a brush — he prints his images quite the same way that serigraphs are printed, but using watercolours. It explains his clean lines and the perfectly duplicated motifs in his works.

“A student,” says Ramesh, who is faculty at the department of fine arts at Andhra University, “did printing jobs on the side to earn some money on the side. Seeing him, I had the idea to print with watercolours.” Ramesh, who’d worked mainly in oils until then, says, “I first printed a small fish [along with the tortoise, a recurring motif in Ramesh’s works, alluding to Vishnu, “the incarnation of the divine who carries the burden of truth”]. But it was too flat an image and so I poured a mug of water on it. But I found that the impression of the fish remained. It was a very interesting effect.”

Thus, Ramesh turns watercolour’s very delicacy into its strength, printing, washing away, and re-printing over an image using different colours. “I incorporate every mistake, even a false start, into the paintings,” he tells Madhu Jain in an interview. “This process certainly opened new ways of articulation…An exciting aspect is [also] the freedom to have large white spaces — blank areas.”

It’s a technique that works very well since it gives a certain lightness to Ramesh’s paintings, which arise from his extensive reading of Advaita philosophy, and are deeply meditative about issues of “faith, devotion and transcendence”. Oils, one imagines, would have made this very heavy subject doubly ponderous. “The earlier solidity of the human figure has given way to a blurring of boundaries,” he says. It’s just the ambiguity that Ramesh is aiming at.