Colour of Words

By M H Ahssan

Well-known Marathi poet Dilip Chitre’s works on paper, now on show in Mumbai, radiates the lyricality of a good poem.

A few years ago, when I met Dilip Chitre at his Pune home, he showed me some of his paintings. A few were on display around the house, with literally hundreds of them being dug out of hibernation from underneath by the poet and his wife, Viju. They were spread on the floor like some fossils dug out; like specimens of ones archetypal consciousness. They were many, hundreds, perhaps thousands.

From then on, Chitre would show me new works each time I visited him. Paper and canvas were marked with charcoal, acyclic, oil and ink among others. The sheer rate of his production is alarming. The range of his concerns is wide and the ease with which he cuts across various media and styles is breathtaking.

My first encounter with Chitre’s works had a strange impact on me. The visuals and the onomatopoetic bearing of the works – which vibrated to generate a kind of diaphonic susurration – stirred my reactions. Some of his works have the ability to create what he calls ‘zallal’, a display of light and sound that one experiences during thunder and rains or may be even during volcanic eruptions.

The pictorial language resonates with the anguished cries of the searching individual who forever finds himself in blackness. The artist’s restlessness, instigating curiosity, and prodigal energy drive him to the compulsive act of painting. Painting therefore gives him another tool to impinge the unsung depths of black ambiguities.

Violent surreal distortions, biomorphic exploitation of forms (where the form merely hints at a resemblance to breasts, buttocks, pudendum and others), strange organisms and dangerous, yet subtle, slits and splotches, all of which Chitre uses to construct his own theatre. Or, build a poetic universe where images – such as those of Vitthal Rakhumai, Pandharpur, Chandrabhaga or Khandoba – hitherto unknown to the contemporary Indian art practice, emerge and lead the viewer to the infinite void that is the universe.

Chitre’s comprehension is personal, seminal and decisive. And, therefore, it can often be read as blasphemous, provocative and colossal. The idea of continuous dynamic is the pivotal force to his style of painting. It subsumes the energy of abstract expressionism as also the tranquillity and mysticism of the gestural.

Space and its various dimensions occupy an interesting place in most of Chitre’s work. Sometimes he places geometrical forms of spaces and then smudges on a coloured background. The edges are not defined and therefore their spatial positions are confusing. In the shallow space, they float towards us or away from us. He experiments with fractal equations to venture into a voyage of patterns, where the forms and the space set up a subtle rhythmic pulsation.

Sometimes the space itself is pregnant and it oozes in Rainer Maria Rilke’s voice: “What birds plunge through is not the intimate space, in which you see all forms intensified… Space reaches from us and constructs the world:, to know a tree, in its true element.” The viewer, Chitre hypnotises, to compel him to “throw inner space around it, from the pure abundance [in him]”.

Ludwig Wittgenstein has written about the need for the colours in a painting to be treated as concepts of sensation. VS Gaitonde used to call them (colour) structures. In other words, a painting can be viewed as a composition of structures and superstructures to form some organically synthesised body, the work of art.
Therefore, the colour structures tend to form their own ecosystem.

I believe that every painting or work of art evolves its dynamics generated through a dialectics, which get thrown into relief by the interplay between the participating colours. This dialectic emerging out of individual colour structures has its own likes and dislikes and wants and desires. Together they build their own language. Colours being concepts of sensation, like words, are psychological as much as they are logical.

From Aristotle to Runge. And from Newton through Goethe. Several artists, scientists and thinkers have developed their own theories to understand colours and own order systems. One’s understanding of colour is not made evident by the ease with which one can identify them on a colour chart, colour circle or a 3D colour globe. Although necessary, such understanding has its own limitation.

In a work of art, such as a painting, the process of structure construction is as complex as the articulation of sentences in poetry; creating colour rhymes and other internal relations becomes imperative. Like in poetry, every detail and feature of the painting is a discovery among colour words that aren’t bound to the thoughts of hypothetical character. Painting and poetry can be symbolic and figurative; non-realistic and denotative, implicit and literal. It is a movement of many figures and objects and spaces and dimensions. It’s like dance or music, not like a discourse or a lyrical form alone.

Chitre’s landscapes possess the lyricality of a good poem. He understands colours as complex structures, and uses them like colour words, to create a visual poetry and sometimes even a theatre. His unswerving and patient saga with his colour box is a curious and complex game of colour words aimed to explore the theory of colour structures and their interrelations.

Why does one paint or write? This question has been raised, discussed and answered many times. For me, the simple answer is, one writes or paints or sings because he does not see himself worthy of anything else and cannot do anything else better. Vijay Tendulkar had once said, “One writes because he is destined to write. His options are closed. Once one accepts the hand of destiny, life gets easy.”

Then the question comes why one is destined to do something and not something else? In Chitre’s case I have been unable to comprehend his tireless efforts to paint day after day, when he neither earns a living from his works nor does he show them periodically. What is it then? His poetic world is well established and well settled, and it is not the same as his world as a painter.

In fact, to be honest, when I first saw his works, I thought he was tackling some psychological problems through them. A link between artistic genius on the one hand and schizophrenia and manic depression on the other, is widely discussed. And another link between savant syndrome and autism is well defined in the films such as The Rainmaker (1997). One of the conditions that many affected people have is restrictive and repetitive behaviours and interests (RRBI). But a child who could for hours watch his own hands happily spinning coins or watch drops of water fall from his fingers, could just as easily be a connoisseur, spotting the minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetitions. Researchers suggest that secret of becoming savant is ‘hyper-systematising and hyper attention to detail’.