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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Inverse street
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Inverse street

Artist Fawad Tamkanat's first solo in 11 years brings the streets of Hyderabad to Mumbai

The Rickshawallah, a painting by Fawad TamkanatPremium
The Rickshawallah, a painting by Fawad Tamkanat

Oh my God, on Mumbai streets, everyone is just pareshaan (worried). People go to work everywhere, but those who do so on Mumbai streets look like they’re going to die if they don’t get somewhere soon. There is no peace; I can’t stand it, though I’m showing there," laughs Fawad Tamkanat on the phone from Hyderabad. Comparatively, he finds the streets of Delhi wide, calm and subtle; Varanasi, cultured, and Kolkata by-lanes, charming. The distinctions stay with him, but it is the detail of Hyderabad’s bustling lanes that he paints.

His forthcoming showing at the Jamaat art gallery, Mumbai, Walking My Streets, is a collection of new works from a series he began five-six years ago, and is his first solo in India in 11 years.

Tamkanat, son of Urdu poet Shaz Tamkanat, found narratives tugging at him as he walked the considerable distance from his home to his studio in Hyderabad every day. His works, deeply influenced by the Telangana temperament typical of Laxma Goud and Thota Vaikuntam, have integrated watercolour, etching, dry point and tarpaulin, to create a cut colour rendering, i.e. colours that resemble the negative of a photograph rather than the print itself. He has also moved from monochromes—a softer palette—to vibrant hues since his early works. Painstakingly detailed as they are, he consciously moves them away from an increasing international trend of realism; nor do they grapple to carve an ideology—political or sociological—off the streets. “The way I live, I paint. There is a natural aesthetic to the streets, which we ignore, and which is my language. That, and the context."

Tamkanat is also a photographer and while his study of the streets is sociological, and political motifs and commentary do creep in, he says, there is a control that is essential to lift the canvas above comment on class or social distinctions like rich and poor. “When there is awareness, you choose what walks into your canvas. It is the argument of space and it is as much about what you minus from the canvas as what you put on it. I used to watch a rickshawallah sit at an Irani café every morning on my way for a few years. He was an elegant figure in his beautiful kurta and flowing lungi, a scarf around his head. To paint him is not to narrate his pathos, or to tell his story, though it exists in his social context. It is elevating it to the aesthetic of that narrative and that context," he says.

Tamkanat was most recently in Mumbai for the art show at which 70 works by as many artists were especially commissioned by the family on the occasion of actor Amitabh Bachchan’s 70th birthday. Tamkanat’s work was that of a street performer.

“The family has a great aesthetic sensibility. People assume that when it’s a big name, they have no understanding of art, but the Bachchans knew each artist by name and style, whether it’s me or Paresh Maity, and have a large collection of works.

“So also with Salman (Khan), his works may not be worth the crores they sell for, but I have seen his works and there is an obvious talent there. You cannot judge a work by its price, after all. Celebrity patronage for art is not always as bad as it is made out to be," he says.

Walking My Streets will be on from 12 December-7 January at the Jamaat art gallery, Ground floor, National House, Tulloch Road, opposite Bade Miyan, Colaba, Mumbai (22820718).

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Published: 30 Nov 2012, 05:21 PM IST
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