WEAVING ON CANVAS

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who returns with a solo exhibit in Mumbai after 20 years, talks about the making of an artist.

- JISHNU BANDYOPADHYAY

For more than six decades, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh has been a weaver of worlds. Not on a loom, but on canvas, and with words as fine as threads. He is a painter, a poet, and a writer who sees time not as a linear path, but as a shimmering fabric where past, present, and future intertwine. Bazaar India sits down with the 87-year-old for a conversation at his exhibition at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road, titled Kaarawaan and Other Works, organised in association with Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery.

Harper’s Bazaar: Your early work explored the subconscious. How has your art evolved?

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh: It is difficult to put down in a few words what transpired in a career of over 60 years. A series of changes took place over time depending upon the change of location, and changing contexts: historical, social, political, and personal, all together necessitating changing perspectives. During the early ’60s, when I began my professional life as a painter, an image of a solitary horse preoccupied me: it was quite different from MF Husain whose horses were timeless whereas my horse was an animal harnessed to a tonga drawn from my childhood experiences. In the late ’60s, I sought magical encounters in the elements of landscapes depicting trees rising over mountains alongside images of erotic play. What transpired in subsequent periods is too complicated and rather long to describe. Your comment about the role of the subconscious is not off the mark, but I would add that it was a conflation of the conscious, of social and historical awareness with the subconscious that perhaps guided those works.

HB: But you have had your disagreements with the purely abstract. What made you focus on a socially reactive figuration in your art?