The Intimacy Of Everyday Space

- Sudhir Patwardhan, Jitish Kallat

Jitish Kallat While I was writing the essay ‘Citing the City’ on your work in 2008, I remember being drawn towards thinking about the unique starting point of your journey into art. I recall writing in the essay, about how in conventional art school training, the model posing in a figure drawing class is progressively removed, with every passing minute, from the context of the figure’s life so that the student can then start recording likeness, proportion, foreshortening, chiaroscuro, etc. While those qualities in drawing were also important for you, you would begin your study of the body as a medical student at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune. From the medical school, where the body is seen as an organism journeying between the shores of illness and health, you’d move to the street to sketch after class. Observing the passers-by, reading the body in a wider social context, your drawing would measure the figure vis-à-vis the webwork of class hierarchies and human struggles? Could you speak a little about that early moment, Sudhir?