"dit-dot-dash", collages with a dash of dot, by manjula padmanabhan Options

[arnab]

another subcontinent is proud to present our second exhibition of art by manjula padmanabhan: "dit-dot-dash -- collages with a dash of dot". this will be our featured exhibition till june 13, 2008, and will be available thereafter in our archive of visual features.

we invite your comments and feedback here. manjula will join the discussion (and if the discussion of her first exhibition is any guide, it promises to be a lively one).














....and stay tuned for more from manjula very soon......

[arnab]

(before the discussion starts i want to apologize for the delays in getting this feature online. when we'd done the first exhibition of manjula's prints 3 years ago (!) she'd thanked me for my patience, and now it is my turn to thank her for hers: she had sent me everything i needed on schedule and this was supposed to have gone up on schedule 10 days ago. i've just been unaccountably busy for the last few weeks, and all my commitments are rolling back down on me. actually, while i'm at it, i should apologize to all our featured artists and writers for the last few months who've probably gnashed their teeth in silence as well!)

[Sue Darlow]

Arnab, while some of us might have had the odd teeth gnashing moment, I'm sure we most of us appreciate that all the work you put into running this site (along with the other moderators) is voluntary and we thank you for that!

[hibiscus]

Echoing Sue.

[magnolia]

No gnashing of teeth please! I'm delighted to see these pieces up on the net coz they've never been aired in virtual space before. I'm flattered to be invited to return to Another Subcontinent and would like to repeat what I wrote to Arnab a couple of weeks ago: my earlier show here produced a small but consistent trickle of responses. I think all netizens know by now how rare it is to frequent a site which remains available -- and FREE! -- for long periods of time. So treat yourselves to bouquets of chrysanthemums and big bowls of icecream (LOTS of sprinkles!), team! You're doing a great job.

[frangipani]

Hi Manjula, congratulations on a terrific set of squiggles! I am taken aback by the sheer vibrance and playfulness of your colours, and just spent some time gazing at the wonderful contrasts.

I loved Sunspots, Green Window, Aperture, Ferns... but when I first saw "Ferns" before looking at the titles, I thought - cars and skyscrapers!

[magnolia]

... but when I first saw "Ferns" before looking at the titles, I thought - cars and skyscrapers!

*grin* I love it when a drawing/painting begins to function like a Rorschach blot! Most of these pieces didn't have names to begin with; "finding" the names was something I did right before getting myself organized for the show in Madras -- and I don't, by any means, feel there's only one name/interpretation.

[gingerly]

a very warm welcome back to as, manjula! and such a colourful return!

i love how these images look almost woven- several remind me strongly of swatches of fabric. how do you dispense the paint? and is it a very fast drying medium?

[magnolia]

... how do you dispense the paint? and is it a very fast drying medium?

Hi gingerly! Glad to be back here ... and thnx for the friendlies.

It's not instant-drying, and is squeezed out of nozzles -- it's unpredictable and ornery, sometimes emerging in horrid little squirts and other times getting all blocked and obstinate. So not exactly ideal for fine, delicate effects.

One of my friends was very honest and said she really didn't like this work because it was just too facile. I know what she meant -- but I continued (and continue ...) to squiggle. Most of these pieces are quite small (one foot square), so the way they look onscreen is quite different to what they're like in RL -- I mean, onscreen, it feels as if one's nose is right in there with all those little splotches and squirts. They're kind of funny -- I mean, whenever I look at them, I want to smile because they're just so ... so ... BLOBBY. More like some kind of food item than art.

[raavi]

Hi Magnolia,

The dots reminded me of Australian aboriginal art (any others that found it similar? Violet? Matilda?). Is that a source of inspiration, or were you trying to emulate that particular style? I like how simple the overall layout for many of the pieces was, but some were a bit strange, conceptually. e.g. why was the moon in "Pink Moon" on the ground? Or was that the sea?

Pigeon and Web would probably be my overall favourites.

[magnolia]

Hi Magnolia,

The dots reminded me of Australian aboriginal art (any others that found it similar? Violet? Matilda?). Is that a source of inspiration, or were you trying to emulate that particular style? I like how simple the overall layout for many of the pieces was, but some were a bit strange, conceptually. e.g. why was the moon in "Pink Moon" on the ground? Or was that the sea?

Pigeon and Web would probably be my overall favourites.

I saw the resemblance to Australian "dot-paintings" later on, but they weren't a source of inspiration. I use dots in my illustrations a great deal too. Of course in my illustrations they're tiny, so they don't have the presence of the fat contented-looking items that appear in these collages!

The conceptual strangeness -- ha! That's coz the titles followed completion, not the other way around. I began with bits of paper, shifting them around on the background, which was, for all the pieces, a bit of white mountboard cut to (the same) size. I was deliberately trying to avoid my pencil-on-paper approach of starting with a carefully drawn rough followed by inking-in so I positioned scraps of paper from each completed collage for the next in line, if you see what I mean. I think the moon of Pink Moon was cut away from the sun of Sunspots, for instance. I have a minor (!) fixation when it comes to paper -- I HATE to waste paper and I routinely store even tiny scraps for possible later use, particularly if the paper is special in some way -- like the hand-made paper that forms the foundation of all these collages.

I have always LOVED sticking bits of coloured paper together to form pictures or just colour-compositions -- it's a pleasure that dates back to my late teens. I think perhaps my earliest sold works were brightly coloured collages made out of sheets of printed coloured paper made by the leading Indian art supplier at the time, the Camlin (or Camel -- I'm not sure by which name the company was first known) company. They had come out with a range of fluorescent-coloured sheets and I was practically stuck to them like a moth to light -- I just couldn't get enough of staring at the blinding brightness of those unnatural colours!

These recent collages (or "hybrids" as I have called them elsewhere) were set off by the immense delight I got from visiting an outlet here for handmade papers -- I'll have to dig up the name of the place and post it here -- but whenever I return to the place, I walk in with the same feeling I might have got, as a child, walking into an old-fashioned candy-store! A silent whooping of delight because the colours and textures are just so GORGEOUS! I think in fact there IS some kind of mapping of one pleasure over the other, I mean, I think I really do relate the colours to flavours in some way. I mean the pink of Pink Moon -- is it not very obviously RASPBERRY? And the background of Clothed Nude is definitely tutti-frutti ice-cream (without the bits) ...

Oh! -- and -- I'd say Pink Moon is at the horizon and is about to sink into the sea.

This post has been edited by magnolia: May 20 2008, 03:29 PM

[Banjaran]

very interesting and unusual.. AS exhibition window is without fault ever inspiring and opens a new dimension for me with each showcase. Spent a good half an hour looking at images and searching net for further reading.


.. Very Nice Manjula, enjoyed going through the galleries.... loving its bold colors, use of orange, yellow, red.. energetic and captivating. I liked 'aperture' the most.. and also 'web'.. in case of 'web', it gives the feel of emboss, and the urge to touch and trace the lines with finger tips, absorbing the texture.

[magnolia]

I liked 'aperture' the most.. and also 'web'.. in case of 'web', it gives the feel of emboss, and the urge to touch and trace the lines with finger tips, absorbing the texture.

I like Web too -- it surprised me -- I didn't expect the white paper to become wispy at the edges when I stuck it down. The bumpy texture of the paint does seem to invite being touched -- but there's a pane of plexiglass between the viewer and the paint! You can't see it, but it's there. I was worried about dust collecting on all the raised surfaces so I sandwiched the pieces between their mount-board foundation and the plexiglass panes. There's also a temptation to peel off the paint ... like peeling a dry scab off a wound ... a minor satisfaction of the kind that adults routinely prevent their children from exploring. That was the other reason I sealed off the squiggles: to withhold unseemly satisfactions. Nasty, huh? *grin*

This post has been edited by magnolia: May 21 2008, 12:48 AM

[gingerly]

There's also a temptation to peel off the paint ... like peeling a dry scab off a wound ... a minor satisfaction of the kind that adults routinely prevent their children from exploring. That was the other reason I sealed off the squiggles: to withhold unseemly satisfactions. Nasty, huh? *grin*

((shudder))
how fast do you need to work on that handmade paper? i really like the way it works in 'bhutan'.
i don't know about 'facile', but i think the work looks strangely satisfying, particularly since it was shown with the work in the earlier feature. i'd enjoy seeing 'ferns' and 'blue grass' (gallery 5) as very different views of similar subjects!

[xena]

Wonderful whimsical work, Manjula.

I liked Face (for some reason it reminded me of your Suki strip) and the voluptuously lacy Clothed Nude.

I understand why you need to frame them behind plexiglas, but part of me wishes they weren't boxed away - I bet there is a very sensuous feel to the textured paper and the blobs.

love it when a drawing/painting begins to function like a Rorschach blot!

I have decided your paintings would be a great way to find out what people have on their mind - I've just showed them to a couple, without the titles and asked "what does it remind you of?". So far, I've concluded I have some disturbed people around me - one was convinced they were all bacteria - we began with diatom, which really does look like diatoms so I was indulgent of blob=lifeform, but when every blob was identified as a virus or a bacterium, I concluded he has serious hypochondriacal issues. The other person saw the blobs as sperms - red field was all unsuccessful sperm, except for one triumph, so also red shift - while transmission were obviously twins, I'll spare you the others. Thought you might get a grin out of what free associations are being thrown up by the blobs.

[magnolia]

I have decided your paintings would be a great way to find out what people have on their mind - I've just showed them to a couple, without the titles and asked "what does it remind you of?". So far, I've concluded I have some disturbed people around me - one was convinced they were all bacteria ... Thought you might get a grin out of what free associations are being thrown up by the blobs.

*grinning*

Yessss! I like that.

Maybe I was a molecular biologist in a previous incarnation (hmmm ... can't have been TOO previous, as they didn't exist until quite recently)? Or maybe I was just channeling the thought-stream of a friendly neighbourhood amoeba. DIATOMS got its name as a back-inspiration from a wonderful story called "Surface Tension" by James Blish -- I mean that I named the painting after it was done, but the reference came from the diatoms featured in that story.


gingerly -- no, the handmade paper doesn't react to the paint because the paint isn't directly on the paper. There are TWO layers of perspex, the first laid directly on the paper collage, and the paint laid on the perspex. That's why, in some of the paintings, you can see an odd, hard-to-explain shadow that looks a little as if the photograph's suffering from shaky-hand syndrome (look again at BHUTAN -- it's especially obvious in that one). The second layer of perspex is to thwart peel-freaks and dust, as previously explained. Initially, I laid the paint directly on the paper and of course it (the paper) began to buckle. I find it extremely annoying to deal with that buckling -- it actually offends me: I react to the paper as if it were a sentient being, bent upon resisting me.

Ha! Which is when I decided to subdue it under a layer of perspex. It's practically invisible after all and very few people bother to ask.

[gingerly]

aaahh! gotit! i'd put that shimmer down to some cunningly pearlised blend of paint!