CHENNAI: Art Houz is hosting an exhibition titled ‘Dot Dash Line and its Narrative’, on the idea of drawing being an independent art form. The inspiration for this exhibition emerged from the fact that drawing is losing its lustre as an important form of expression within the contemporary milieu, as the digital medium and virtual world are offering immense possibilities of acquiring images without having to go through the cerebration or ideational process.
“Many artists are of the opinion that skill need not be the criterion for creating a drawing and that the computer mouse will provide the substitute,” said Dr Ashrafi S Bhagat, curator of the exhibition and art historian, critic and independent curator. “But they fail to understand that it is the human hand which is manipulating the mouse to obtain the imagery required. Thus, whatever the means, skill continues to be the chief criterion. Hence the central aim was to highlight the varied possibilities of evolving drawings through a language that could be figurative or abstract. The crux of the idea is to make use of any of the elements individually, as the dot or dash or line, or in combination to create a narrative that could be premised on the artists’ own emotional journey.”
Artists included in the show are Anjani Reddy from Hyderabad, SG Vasudev from Bengaluru, PG Dinesh from Kerala, Avinash Karan from Varanasi and Mark Rathiraj, Parvathi Nayar, Siva Balan, RM Palaniappan, Venkatapathy, Vijay Pichumani and RB Bhaskaran from Chennai.
According to the curator, ‘drawing’ covers, in general, all those representations in which an image is obtained through markings in ink, pencil, coloured pastels, charcoal, etc, either in a simple or elaborate manner. In this sense, she said, drawing is the basis of every pictorial experience, particularly that of painting.
“The most fundamental convention accepted as the starting point for drawing is the dot, which gets extended as a dash and further stretched becomes a line or the stroke. Even if drawing is the first step in the artistic process, it does not necessarily mean that it is extemporaneous or always spontaneous in character; a certain type of finished work which is intended to appear extemporaneous are left in the stage of drawing, such as caricatures or illustrations.”
The exhibition will be at Art Houz on August 23, 6.30 pm onwards. For more details, contact 42107100.
Art and the artists
The central aim is to highlight the varied possibilities of evolving drawings through a language that could be figurative or abstract. Artists included in the show are Anjani Reddy from Hyderabad, SG Vasudev from Bengaluru, PG Dinesh from Kerala, Avinash Karan from Varanasi and Mark Rathiraj, Parvathi Nayar, Siva Balan, RM Palaniappan, and RB Bhaskaran from Chennai.