Artistic encounters: How animals inspire contemporary artists
Artists like Bharti Kher, Waswo X Waswo and Amit Ambalal draw inspiration from the wild. Animals become totems for ecological change, migration, and even conflict
Some years ago, Bharti Kher wanted to see the heart of a sperm whale. She couldn’t find a photograph online or in libraries—which came as a surprise since the contemporary artist, like most of us, thought there’s nothing one can’t find online anymore. Whales, she learned, sink to the bottom of the sea when they die, and the bodies are not preserved even if they die on shore. Her quest to see the massive creature’s heart became the subject of her 2007 work An Absence of Assignable Cause, which depicts a two-chambered, red-andturquoise heart in fibreglass decorated with her signature bindis. “The idea was that we need the beating heart of this incredible creature to heal the world."
Kher often uses animal forms in her works that contemplate ecology, myth, gender and the body. In The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006), a female white elephant, covered in white snakeshaped bindis, slumps to the floor in death throes, signifying human folly and hubris that leads to ecological disaster. “For me, animals are both the motif and the medium," says Kher. Like Kher, several contemporary artists draw inspiration from the animal world. Animals become totems for environmental destruction, urbanization, policy failure, migration, loss of tradition and history, even conflict and war. A drowning elephant was part of Sheba Chhachhi’s Water Diviner (2008), an installation to comment on the pollution of the Yamuna. Amitesh Shrivastava uses feral brush strokes to evoke fur and the sense of lurking animals in his semi-abstract works. The presence of animals in artwork is never accidental, unlike an encounter with a wild creature in real life.
Artists turn to animal motifs to balance the pictorial space, depict a multitude of emotions from danger or despair, to create a portal to the strange or the uncanny, or to evoke a sense of illusion. It is both a reflection of our connection to nature as well as a symbol of the fact that we have moved so far from the natural world. The themes may differ but in each of these works, animals serve as a muse for artists.
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Even here, a politics of preference based on human perception is involved. “Some of the animals used in modern art form an alternative persona to the artist’s own imagination," says art historian and author Yashodhara Dalmia. She gives the example of Krishen Khanna’s monochromatic charcoal drawings—a man with a bandaged face with a falcon on his wrist, an elephant wrestling a tiger, a pack of buffaloes wading—that represent the bloodshed and displacement of Partition. “Khanna was influenced by the plight of the common man and for him the jungle symbolised the alternative persona of the common man," explains Dalmia. His falcons, elephants and tigers are drawn from the miniature tradition but recontextualised through scale and expression.
On the other hand, Tyeb Mehta reinvented the myth of Mahishasuramardini through his bull paintings to expose the challenges of a new state and the struggle between good and evil. “For Tyeb Mehta, the primary concern was India being beset by corruption, communalism and poor governance," says Dalmia. “The trussed and falling bulls were symbols of the demonic state of things and power imbalance."
It was not merely to allude to the idea of the nation state but also to construct the qualities of an ideal man that the symbolism of animals was used—MF Husain’s horses being a case in point. “Husain’s horses represented a kind of male prowess through their speed, facial expressions and body language," says Dalmia. “ They were a symbol of virility. Husain depicted horses in various ways—the treatment and expressions changed over the years."
Contemporary artist Amit Ambalal uses animals to poke fun at human foibles. “[They] are a visual device through which I traverse the unknown," says the artist. He paints animals in expressionistic colours like emerald green, ultramarine blue, inspired by Nathdwara paintings—you can spot a red golden retriever or a blue monkey in his works. “Human situations can be expressed effectively through the body language of birds and animals," he says.
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Like Ambalal, several others have one eye on the past while speaking in a contemporary language. In the work of American artist Waswo X Waswo you can spot black bucks, nilgai, gazelles and deer, a reflection of the landscape of Rajasthan where he lives and practices in collaboration with Indian artists. His Heaven depicts a golden-hued grove where he and his partner, Tommy, who passed away recently, are seen feeding carrots to black bucks. “If we could co-exist with the natural world, that would be heaven to me," says Waswo. In Dream of Hiroshi series, a stream of green parrots fly free. The Indian miniature artists he works with told him that green parrots in this artistic tradition act as guides. “Following them tells you the direction that you’re supposed to be viewing the miniature from," he explains.
Zebras, giraffes, crocodiles and hawks are common in Paula Sengupta’s works, inspired by African safaris and frescoes in Egyptian tombs. She combines these with ideas from the Jataka Tales, and places a zebra with a tiger or a hippopotamus in a river with a rhinoceros. “I introduce creatures that are contrary to that landscape or juxtapose different times in our environmental history to upset the balance," says Sengupta. “I am stressing that through mindless interventions, we are jeopardizing the whole ecosystem."
Similar ideas come through in Arun Kumar H.G.’s recurrent use of the varaha (boar) and nandi (cow). Animals leave the zone of reality and become phantoms of the mind in Ratheesh T’s works. He transforms autobiographical vignettes into phantasmagoria; a boar encountered during a night vigil is the voracious, muddling monster in the head or a birdman is the self image of a misfit.
Often animals act as a synonym for a distinct feeling or as a proxy for sound. The animal world can also depict inner, emotional, very human landscapes as Mahesh Baliga does. “The animal form itself is able to denote certain emotions or certain tensions that you think is not possible with painting just a human figure," he says, pointing out a frightened black cat brooding outside a rat hole in one of his works. In Backyard (2023), green and white peacocks perch on branches of a dying, shrouded tree. “There is the ache of losing something," says Baliga. “At that time, several things like the CAA-NRC and Kashmir issue were going on and I wanted to convey that something beautiful, even the idea of a nation, can go awry." Vivan Sundaram too painted a weapon-wielding rhinoceros and a beetle with a human head and bullets as wings in the 1970s to refer to the excesses of the Emergency.
“When I make animals, I am usually talking about the state of human affairs, and when I make humans, I make them animalistic to show their vulnerabilities or hubris," says Kher. “The animal is a carrier… I burden (it) with narrative, mythology and cultural tropes."
The human gaze on animals is the theme of Ravi Agarwal’s current Natural History Museum project in which he critiques dioramas. “Natural museums other non-humans, categorizing, classifying and putting them on display," he says. “Within the display, there is a hierarchy. Large animals are spectacular trophies, smaller or less likeable ones are hidden." This stems from the way we perceive animals in the real world: some serve purposes of labour, others are conserved as charismatic species. “In a museum all signs of the origins of animals, their relationships with local ecologies or cultures are erased. They are depicted in typical dioramas like the ‘family’ of lions, which is not how lions live in the wild. We imprint them with human structures," he explains. All of these ideas, notions and prejudices are also reflected in society around us—felines as symbols of prowess, horses for virility, gazelles for a sense of the feminine. ‘Unlikeable’ animals like scorpions, snakes and lizards rarely feature in Westernised art though they abound in forms of indigenous art.
These ideas have a commercial fallout as well. Waswo explains that he added snakes to one series of miniatures, but could not find buyers for the works. Initially, his series featuring owls did not sell because the bird has mixed connotations in Indian culture. “Owls are considered an auspicious presence as they are the vehicle of Lakshmi but some people consider them an omen," says Waswo. In one landscape, he paints himself mid-air with wings, about to descend a garden, which has a Jeff Coons-poodle standing in front of a pool. “The owl in the foreground is looking at the viewer with a conniving expression and kind of asking, ’Isn’t this silly?’ In my works, the owl is always making eye contact with the viewers, drawing them in." Like this owl, for artists, animals act as a friend, cipher, phantom and guide.
Shweta Upadhyay is an arts journalist and co-author of the photobook 'I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you'.
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