VAN GOGH - JANATA ISHTYLE...

This article appeared originally in Mumbai Mirror, of the Times Of India group.

A POTRAIT OF THE COMMON MAN, AS ARTIST

This artist outside Jehangir Art Gallery has been reading and recording Mumbai's faces for the last seven years, finds Rishi Majumder

Frenzied charcoal strokes dance ragingly against paper. First come the camera and poignantly poised head. Then a shut eye, and slight grimace under the moustache. Finally, the taut ready-for-action body language completes itself in a crescendo. "Your photographer's expression and movement gives me speed no?" lisps 58 year old artist Vijay Parasnaik at the Jehangir Art Gallery sidewalk, even as he creates undistracted – amidst 8 watchers on. "So I put what I feel on paper – impressionistic art no?" He then explains that the photographer is "Harried, ultra-hardworking and does not do 'drama'." "Art is part face reading no?" he concludes, having captured on paper the man who was capturing him on film. Impressive impressionism no?

The frail but thickly spectacled and Tilak-ed J J Vallaya graduate who once oversaw the art departments of a newspaper and ad agency consecutively, settled on the Kala Ghoda sidewalk seven years ago: "I wanted to give common folk art which they could afford!" The man who punctuates every sentence with an enquiring 'no?' emitted through missing teeth has never used the adverb for an assignment: "I do caricatures, realistic portraits, landscape and even logos. I use water-colour, charcoal, pencil and acrylic. I paint on canvas and paper." But the diversity doesn't stop there. "With every sketch, I find a new character," Parasnaik reveals delightedly as his real reason for sticking to the footpath.

A Steadler HB pencil waltzes on paper now, as he imprints the next face. In every way, an ordinary face. Parasnaik first asks the man where he's from and what he does. Then he tells him to shift position to get the 'best angle'. "He's been through a bad phase and came out of it," he whispers about the middle-aged man he's photocopying. "That's why he's so calm." Some faces are angry, Parasnaik says, some "smart" (read confident), some "sound" (read contented) and so on. "If people give me liberty, I take their qualities to another level, like with your photographer. Other wise I give them a plain realistic drawing that makes them look good," he sighs, filling patches inside the outline. And sometimes, "I make a serious person smile!" he giggles wickedly.



The next muse to tread hesitatingly into focus is a five year-old. Parasnaik begs the parents to not force her to smile or make a gesture: "I should portray purity as it is no?" and begins outlining. Then sit a couple just as it starts raining. "He has come in to meet her for just a day," he shares from under an umbrella. "So they want to be sketched together even in the rain. But he seems very tense." Worry isn't a rare sighting for Parasnaik today. "Five years ago, Mumbaikars were less tense. Now I see fear in everyone's faces," claims the creative soothsayer ominously. "The man's a Dilliwaala", he continues to inform. And should this be an artist's lead? "No!" comes the first assertive use of the word. "Communities and regionality shouldn't burden an artist – they prejudice him!"


The art gallery fence along which he sits displays both anonymity and fame. "Charcoal for getting out the fierce Jahaal (fire) in Bal Gangadhar Tilaks eyes. Asaram Bapu's and Mahatma Gandhi's spiritualism was best captured in soft HB. And Priyanka Chopra's beauty had to be textured in colour," he gushes earnestly. He'd sketched M F Hussain once when he visited the gallery: "He is a busy man, so I had to get that energy. Also the lines that so finely adorn his face… that took me a while to detail." Hussain in acknowledgement, had signed his painting. But more entrenched than this and other acknowledgements received from many a great artist, is a memory of a father had imparted when he'd just started sitting here. He had gotten him the photograph of his son to sketch from. "When I finished, he broke down and touched my feet, saying 'My son died recently in an accident. You have made me feel he is sitting right here'. I felt so terrible no?"