LAW OF THE STUDIO

When the artist becomes a work of art

- BY ANJULY MATHAI

An artist's studio is a place of struggle and triumph, of delight and despair. It is where theatrics is replaced with vulnerability, show with substance. It is where an artist is most himself, alone with the madness from which he churns meaning. This, of course, does not mean that all artistic traditions are identical. A studio, that way, is the litmus for an artist's personality. As Kishore Singh writes in the photo book, Portrait of an Artist, it plays different roles for different artists. For Vincent van Gogh, it was his asylum where he rendered even the walls that confined him into art. For his contemporary Claude Monet, the sprawling beauty of the French countryside was his studio.

A studio is a reflection, not just of the artist but also of his art. It could not have been a soothing space for someone like F.N. Souza, whose art came from an essentially angry place. “Every brush stroke makes me recoil like a snake struck with a stick,” Singh quotes him in the book. “I hate the smell of paint. Painting for me is not beautiful. It is as ugly as a reptile. I attack it.” For his contemporary Avinash Chandra, his process consisted of stripping down to the bare essentials in his heated London basement studio before starting to paint. He would stare at the canvas for a long time before putting a red dot on it. And then, it was “like a dam bursting,” said his wife. He would paint without a break.