Photo Essay: The Secret Life of Studios
In his book Portrait of An Artist, photographer Rohit Chawla captures the creative sanctuaries of India’s most prolific artists
I was a teenager when I first visited a professional artist’s studio in Andretta, Himachal Pradesh. Sobha Singh was someone who had served in the army overseas, but had settled to the life of a painter in a remote Himalayan village. He had created the most incredible portraits of the Sikh gurus, his realism and a little bit of imagination bringing them to life in hundreds of thousands of homes and on altars—not unlike a latter-day Raja Ravi Varma. What fascinated me at the time, and I remember three visits over the course of two years, was a deep sense of melancholy, the stories that flew like bees around a hive, of Norah Richards, the potter, whose grandson had drowned in the fountain outside her studio. The fountain was, of course, dry, drained of water since the accident.
Did the tragedy add to the artist’s paintings of the greatest, most tragic love stories that arose from the soil of the Punjab? Those personal stories were always the touchstone for artists’ lives and practices that I searched for when, late in my writing career, I turned my attention to the visual arts. Their studios, their personal workspaces, were places where they grappled with their own demons to create art that was both personal and universal, something intimate but also larger than they imagined. What was it about their studios that made them stoic, cerebral, personal, whimsical, reticent, soulful, creative?
I was a teenager when I first visited a professional artist’s studio in Andretta, Himachal Pradesh. Sobha Singh was someone who had served in the army overseas, but had settled to the life of a painter in a remote Himalayan village. He had created the most incredible portraits of the Sikh gurus, his realism and a little bit of imagination bringing them to life in hundreds of thousands of homes and on altars—not unlike a latter-day Raja Ravi Varma. What fascinated me at the time, and I remember three visits over the course of two years, was a deep sense of melancholy, the stories that flew like bees around a hive, of Norah Richards, the potter, whose grandson had drowned in the fountain outside her studio. The fountain was, of course, dry, drained of water since the accident.
Did the tragedy add to the artist’s paintings of the greatest, most tragic love stories that arose from the soil of the Punjab? Those personal stories were always the touchstone for artists’ lives and practices that I searched for when, late in my writing career, I turned my attention to the visual arts. Their studios, their personal workspaces, were places where they grappled with their own demons to create art that was both personal and universal, something intimate but also larger than they imagined. What was it about their studios that made them stoic, cerebral, personal, whimsical, reticent, soulful, creative?
Writers’ studies and artists’ studios have long fascinated me, for it is here they bare their souls, even if only to themselves. It is here they seize their demons, overcome their fears and vulnerabilities as they drop all pretences and turn the inward gaze on what is precious to themselves. It is here they confront their uncertainties and resolve their anxieties. It is a lonely place, but also a spot for their triumphs, for it is from here that their works—when completed or to be completed elsewhere—finally emerge.
That a studio is an intensely personal space is a given, but artists impose relationships and rituals upon them that bear reflection. S. H. Raza had his idols and Gandhi hymns; others have their own rhythms—some touch the floor or easel in invocation, others light an oil lamp or an incense stick upon entering the space. Music is essential to a few, a distraction to others. Some are guided by discipline, for others it is wholly unnecessary in their quest for spontaneity and a brief visit by the muse. Some like it minimal, others fill it with all the residues of their lives. They might work sitting on the floor, stretched across a table, suspended from a forklift; strictly by day or all through the night; accept calls or silence their mobiles; have inventories of images at hand for reference or search for them within the repositories of their minds; read books, draw, sketch—or dance; cook, or not; eat, or not; sit silently or talk excitedly; laugh, cry, or laugh and cry; internalize anger or externalize it; create, face, tame or paint storms; turn studios into homes or homes into studios; reflect, contemplate, create.
What is it then—the studio? A place of refuge for the artist away from the world, or the world itself? It is both a space of experimentation and of wonder, the dress rehearsal before the performance, where art is slowly, excitingly—fearlessly, fearfully—brought to life; given shape and provided form; stripped of pretence, layered by reality, contoured by fantasy, the subtle replacing the obvious; a place of negotiation for the spirit of imagination and creativity; a space for urgency and for slowing down, of frenzy and of quietude; a measure of the mind’s ability to soar or crash; of mirrors and reflections but also of shattered fragments that multiply to hold multiple or no images. A studio is both: a place of infinite freedom and a lifelong prison; dream and nightmare; paradise and hell.
In these recesses of dualities and multiplicities, artists are forced to reconcile their experiences and inspirations, their imaginings and impulses, and face the loneliness of the creative spirit with letting go—that moment when the whole world sits in judgement as a work of art crosses the threshold of the studio to meet its fate on a gallery wall that will define its present and future.
Without over-sentimentalizing it, it is akin to a parent letting a child loose in the world: a moment of panic, anxiety, excitement, assurance—and reckoning. It is the moment of truth.
Excerpted from the book Portrait of an Artist, by Rohit Chawla; published by Mapin Publishing and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Available on mapinpub.com