"I have huge interest in the work done by my friends and don’t for a second think the world of art stops at me" — Manu Parekh
As he recovers from a knee surgery, which took three more additional procedures to cure an infection that had set in, Manu Parekh, is getting back to an active regimen of painting daily. At his apartment in Chittaranjan Park, in Delhi, the 83-year-old Padma Shri awardee says, the secret to his long-term work ethos is simple. "Most artists would get scholarships to go to Paris and so on after college and I wanted the same but it didn't happen and I had to take a full-time job with Pupul Jayakar," he says. Jayakar, an Indian cultural activist, went on to found the idea of the National Institute of Design, and the National Institute of Fashion Technology. At the time, the government was backing Indian handicrafts, and he spent a decade in Kolkata, Parekh says, "Between 1965 and 1975, when I was in Kolkata, the arts and crafts and theatre was active and I became an artist thanks to becoming a part of the Bengali intelligentsia." Parekh, originally from Gujarat, speaks fluent Bengali and counts most senior Bengali artists as comrades.
On the walls of his house, which is as simple as can be, are paintings by him, his wife Madhvi Parekh, a digital artist named Ashok Ahuja and his old friend Bhupen Khakhar, who broke auction records a couple years ago. The work by Khakhar is a complex depiction of cycles in a man's life with multiple figures and layers of narratives. Another large acrylic painting on paper which looks like the eye of an elephant with two molecular dark blue blobs but clearly it is meant to be something else, one learns. It's a depiction of the concept of the Yoni and the Shiva Lingam being connected, and is by him. There's also a large work by his wife, of a man and a woman in dark earthy tones; a stylish impressionist of Lord Ganesh in orange tones also by him and a very digital pair of modern looking lithographs or prints of a typewriter, and a setting sun by Ashok Ahuja.
The rest of the home is basic and earthy, replete with wooden furniture that include several sofas, couches and a low, square coffee table on which sits a book titled Listening To Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera. A small Indian national flag occupies an otherwise empty shelf on the wall. On the corner table is a large empty flask of Grey Goose Vodka ahead of which is another empty bottle of Hendricks Gin that has been repurposed into a flower vase. I learn that both Parekh and his wife moderately enjoy a drink or two. "Madhvi more than me," he adds. His studio which is adjacent to the living room is a bare hall full of easels, full and half finished canvases, brushes, easels and cans of paint.
Why does he keep paintings by other artists? It's a way of respecting the works of others and in all these cases he has known these artists well, he explains. He bought the Bhupen Khakhar years ago as he used to hang out with him and go for walks together in the park. There's also another metal sculpture of a horse based on his wife’s sketches but he can't place who did it. How long have these been on his wall and in his home and do they keep changing? Parekh smiles and says, "you can get bored with anything if it's around for too long but that hasn't happened so far with these."
Parekh shifts gears and says, much of everything in life has to do with commitment. His marriage, for example, to his wife was determined when he was 12 and she was nine and they were engaged then but were kept apart. He finally married her when he was 15 years old and then she went back to her home and he went off to college before they were united again later and his takeaway is that "that sort of early commitment may have worked in our favour in everything we did."
Are there others whom Parekh holds in high esteem? In the Indian milieu of artists, he says, Rabindranath Tagore is one of the greatest artists ever because of his authentically original style and the fact that he derived his instincts and work from Indian-ness. He also holds FN Souza in high regard because of his "reckless style and his wondrous talent," followed by Bhupen Khakhar, and, last but not the least, his wife Madhvi Parekh.
He adds, with Tagore, for example, one can see the weaknesses as well as the strengths in his art. "That goes for all the above artists," he says, "There’s a certain innate authenticity of where that content comes from…the rawness of Souza’s work or Madhvi’s work which may appear sweet on the surface but is anything but when you get deeper into it."
International favourites include Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh's later works, Mark Rothko, and, more recently, Banksy.
Is there rivalry between him and his wife given they are both senior artists? “Never, and that’s also partly because I taught her everything I knew. She never had any formal art education while I did,” he says, adding that, as a matter of fact, India has the most number of “artist couples”, perhaps, because of the absence of competition. She's a rural painter working with a modern sensibility which operates on instinct while he is a trained artist, he shares.
It's no secret that Parekh is what one would also call a commercially successful artist yet he lives as if he is still starting out. Why is that? "There's a tremendous contradiction for artists who have to struggle and then hit it big later in life. The contradiction is that no one asks for their work when they are struggling and trying to make a mark early on. Yet when they are famous and established there may be a long line for works that, as you say, don't have the fuel of their struggle in the early years," he says.
"But ultimately it comes down to what I like to describe as the artist's morality," he adds, that it hearkens back to the famous theory of half and half which suggests that "people should have a 50 percent success rate and a 50 percent failure rate so that they remain grounded and balanced. But that’s not how it always works in real life, for everyone."
Success is something that can be difficult to control. Parekh adds that there has to be a struggle for art and while there can be technique, one cannot duplicate some works at times, which is why there's a change in how works transform over time.
In Parekh's case, while recognition did come, it came late. 'I found commercial success very late at the age of 65 and had worked for a job for 25 odd years so it was a good thing because I was awarded a Padma Shri for my efforts in rural India, which helped enhance trade and crafts in a modern way while preserving their unique roots." He refers to a philosophy by theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski that taught, one ought to only attempt being an actor while one kept a day job. For an artist, you could be unemployed as long as you worked at it every day, he adds.
It's well known that art both in India and overseas has been used as a political platform by the likes of Picasso and others, even by many of his contemporaries, yet Manu Parekh has stayed away from that track. "I am more in tune with commenting on culture and I have no interest in politics." As the meeting winds down, the phone rings. It's sculptor Ravinder Reddy on the other side checking to see if Parekh is going to attend a meeting that has been planned. Parekh replies, "I'll definitely be there."
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