Artist Aditi Singh talks to poet, playwright and painter Gieve Patel, about wells, clouds and

the processes of observation and contemplation. Patel's show Wells Clouds Skulls opens at
Bose Pacia on May 5th in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

A: I would like to begin by introducing Emily Dickinson's poem, The Well.

WHAT mystery pervades a well!

The water lives so far--
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen,

But just his lid of glass--
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss's face!

The grass does not appear afraid,

I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is awe to me.

Related somehow they may be,

The sedge stands next the sea--
Where he is floorless
And does no timidity betray

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret
That those that know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
A: My first question is, When did you first think about painting a well?

G: I remember the date exactly. It was 1991, so I would have been 51 years old at that time
and it just came to me that this experience of looking into a well is something that has
been with me since boyhood. And my parents come from this small coastal Gujarat village,
so we were very frequent visitors there, although I was brought up in Bombay, and every
time we'd go there, I would pass these little, small humble wells, not very deep but full of
water and invariably I would look in and the experience was very fulfilling and even today
this experience continues. I never pass a well without looking in. So at the age of 51, I
asked myself, would it be possible to paint what this image means to me? So I tried it out, I
tried one well. And I was pretty happy with what transpired and I believed that would be
the last well I'd be painting, but within the next two months, I was painting another one
and then another one. And each one of them turned out to be a fresh experience, both in
terms of the image and in terms of what that imagery meant to me and now we are in 2012
and I am still painting them.

A: When I first saw your well which was in 2006 when we did the first Bose Pacia show, it
was such a visceral experience for me, because here I was sensing my own body, looking
into the well and seeing the reflected image, so for me it was a meeting of two lives. You
are looking into the stillness of your own image and yet you are very aware of the
movement of the self, and that to me is a wonderful moment in painting.

G: Yes, thank you. Visceral is a very good word. One wouldn't have offhand said that, just
by thinking about it as a subject, that it was likely to be visceral and in fact, it is. You put
your finger on it rather well because I think that perhaps what was happening to me, when
I looked in, was that I was in a sense emptying myself out into that space and then
receiving back again something from it, which is not the literal image.

A: There is a certain tension that comes to mind when you are looking at the wells. You
wouldn't think it, because there is such a serene aspect to just looking at this beautiful
image of a well and the closer you look, you become aware of so many different kinds of
textures layered against each other, so many different kind of shapes and there is a entire
universe that is made within the canvas and that to me is something that I just love about
looking at a painting, how it can encapsulate an entire universe, a painterly universe, and
yet speak about an internal life, an inner life.

It is almost like you are drawing out the experience of a well and I don't mean drawing,
literally, but prolonging the experience of looking at a well as you create it.

G: Everyday, I am looking at something new that will happen to this well, something
unexpected and I keep myself constantly open to this unexpected thing that may happen
and it does happen.

And this is where the subject connects a little bit with the clouds again, the cloud
drawings. A cloud has no final image, it is constantly in a state of formation and dissolution,
both at the same time, and so then there is no question of looking up at a cloud and
sketching it because while you are sketching it, it is becoming something else so then it is
an entirely inner experience and it is out there as well and this is the liberating thing about
taking up a subject like that.

A: That is why when I look at your cloud drawings, for me there is a moment of anticipation
as well as dissolution because you don't know what you are looking at and you have to
suddenly become aware of an image coming together and the minute you are aware of it, it
becomes undone. I love the sensation of constantly coming together and breaking apart,
though I don't think of it as breaking apart, coming undone is better. How do the cloud
drawings fit in, compared to the rest of your other work, your paintings, your landscape,
the wells? The cloud drawings are not about a particular image and they are so much about
sensation.

G: Yes, the kind of brushwork that you talked about with the wells, this is the kind of
brushwork that I have used in my earlier work as well, when I'm working on a figure, or
working on a landscape, very often you have to look at it closely, because it is see-through.
This particular way of working becomes pronounced and liberated when I come to the
wells. I have never felt as liberated as I did during that period when I was working on the
clouds.

A: There is a certain musical element to them. I feel like they are almost notes of music
that have been thrown up into the air and they've taken all these lines and shapes and
forms and its wonderful that we get to see them in New York for a while.

So you are a poet and playwright and I'm sure you've been asked this question many times,
but I wanted to phrase it differently and ask you whether you find or feel that they are
parallel states of mind when you are writing poetry or a play (I'm sure it's not simultaneous
when you do it) or painting, or is it something that you find that has an overlap and a
common thread.

G: They are very distinctively different or why would I want to do all three. I think the one
thing, the kind of fulfillment that each of the three brings that affirm is different and it is
difficult to put it into words but like when I complete a painting, when I complete a poem
or when I complete a play, the common thing is if there is a moment of satisfaction, there
is a moment where you feel that you have at last given back to life a small return for
everything it has given to you, by creating, by recreating it in a different mode, so there is
that sense of gratitude but it's different in each case, the quality of the feeling is different
and it is impossible to put it into words. Maybe I can talk about something more tangible,
like the ingress into each of these three is through different media, so when I am painting I
am talking about color and strokes, strokes primarily, and the relationship of strokes to
each other, whereas in a poem, it will be a relationship of syllables to each other and in a
play it becomes more symphonic, of the relationships to characters, the kinds of colors that
these characters stand for, or the kinds of sounds that these characters stand for and their
relationships to each other. The common thing ultimately is relationship, I think that
perhaps no art form exists without a keen understanding of how things relate to each other.

A: It is interesting that you are saying relationship because I've read your poems and your
plays and I've seen your paintings and if I could grasp at one thing that is a common thread,
it would be stillness. In your work there is a certain stillness which is very evocative, a
certain stillness that is very full and yet is very complete in itself. That for me as the
viewer would be the one common thread.

G: Maybe the stillness comes about when the relationships have been fully articulated.

A: You've been working for the last forty to forty-five years now, it is difficult to name it
and give it a number, but just for the sake of clarity, let's say you've been working that long,
how do you respond to the contextual changes around you in the culture of painting? Or do
you respond to it?

G: I may be mistaken, but I did read somewhere, was it Matisse who said that after a
certain age, when you reach a certain age you cannot relate to what the youngest people
are doing around you and that's a very comforting statement. It frees me of guilt. Put it this
way. I don't visit Europe very often or the US or go out of the country, but when I do, I head
straight for the classical periods of art in the museums. Very little contemporary work
interests me.

A: So how do you see yourself in the contemporary context then, because I feel that your
work does exist as contemporary art, it is not outside?

G: I'd be happy if that were true.

A: It is true especially, I think you don't have to look further than the well to know that and
it's true because the kind of material that you work with, it's very much about sensation
and looking and I don't think that can be bracketed into all the "isms" that have come along
in art history. You stand inside it very much.

How would you define, at this moment in your life, the purpose of art?

G: I think it is about contemplation. At the risk of oversimplifying, I can put it as one word,
the purpose of art is to encourage contemplation. And number two-- the purpose of art is to
encourage the enjoyment of the sense of sight.

A: That is a very John Berger like quote, because of his book Sense of Sight.

G: I would stress the word enjoyment. And the total enjoyment of the sense of sight should
lead you ultimately into a state of contemplation

A: And what about Indian contemporary art? Who do you look at?

G: I look at Akbar Padamsee anywhere. I look at Sudhir Patwardhan. Some early Hussains
are magnificent. Among the younger people I look at Atul and Anju Dodiya, Laxma Goud's
etchings from the 1970s.

A: From the 70s, those birds are amazing.

G: In the forests, the human figures, the birds and the density of the black that he (Goud)
achieves in those etchings is very remarkable.
A: So tell me about the day in the life of Gieve Patel. What do you do when you wake up at
7am in a typical day or an atypical day?

G: It's very humdrum, nothing remarkable. For me it's getting ready to come to the studio
and what is constantly frustrating and something that I have come to accept as a fact of my
studio life is that I just can't come and start work immediately. I need a fairly long time
before I am ready to start painting and I don't know what it is, but I think it is really the
question of shedding all the practical business of life, which is constantly impinging my
mind- the bills, the chores, all the hundreds of things that one has to do, which at least fills
my mind up with, I feel clogged and I want to come here and slowly let all of that recede
and then I listen to music, which is most often western classical music and I listen for a
very short period of time for about say 20 minutes to half an hour and while I am listening
to the music, I don't paint, I just listen to the music and I take a couple of casual strolls in
front of the painting and pretend that I'm not looking at it, but I steal a few glances. I don't
want to alarm the painting.

A: So it's really a meeting of two lives here.

G: While I am allowing the music to do its work and I am allowing my citing of the painting
to do its work and I'm allowing the painting to say something back to me, somewhere
around that time, and I never force the painting to tell me what the next step should be.
I'm very careful not to disturb it. At one point, the painting quietly guides me. And most
often, I trust the instructions and I find I am on the right path.

A: What do you think is the most fundamental aspect of you as an artist, as a complete
artist? What has seen you through all these years?

G: I think perhaps some kind of unwarranted doggedness, obstinacy, some kind of

unreasonable feeling that I know what is best for me to do and nobody else can make me
move from that path.

A: In other words, nerves of steel.

G: But of course, like every other artist, I go through periods of great uncertainty with my
own work. Uncertainty yes, one never knows whether a work is ultimately good to take you
where you want to go, where the work itself wants to go, you may collapse in between and
you may have to forsake the work or whatever but I have a belief that even if I am not
getting there, there is a place where I have to go, either with that poem or with that
painting or with that play, there is a place, and it's a very clear and definite place. I may
not get there and only I know where that place is for me. I'm sure each artist feels that way
about his work. Each artist has his/her own place which works.

A: But you have to trust that implicitly, that it's okay for uncertainty to have its reign.
Because sometimes it takes so long to get out of that mode and see and just see.
It is so so easy to get caught up in the surface of things, especially in the world we live in.
You are talking about all the domestic chores and practicalities and I find that's very true
for myself as well. It takes me longer to kind of shed all those layers and have every voice
in my head walk out that door and for me to shut that door and just be completely silent
and just have my voice rise above all that. That's the hardest, I think, to create, to
endeavor in any kind of creative activity. the shedding of..

My last question is what would your advice be to young artists like myself?

G: It's not my advice to young artists at all. It's a continuing advice to myself which I might
share with you, which is: I advise myself and anybody who wants to be an artist to not just
look at painting or sculpture but to be very aware of great art wherever it is, in whatever
medium, if it is in writing, or in film, or in music and to settle for nothing less than the
greatest because it is only from that, one can be nourished for one's own work.

A: Thank you very much.