Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh believes living in India means living simultaneously in several cultures and times. “The past exists as a living entity alongside the present, each illuminating and sustaining the other,” says the artist.
Sheikh holds a unique position in the contemporary art scene as an artist and an art teacher, having successfully kept the two roles apart and not inflicting one upon the other. For him, painting has been a kind of confrontation from the time he grew up in the provincial town of Surendranagar in Saurashtra. Belonging to a lower middle class Muslim family where it was not customary to think of painting as a profession, he insisted upon going to Baroda to study art and received the Master’s degree from the M S University. The Baroda experience opened up many avenues of interest and exploration, both creative and intellectual. He was exposed to the arts of the world — traditional contemporary, eastern and western, and felt the strong presence of his teachers whose shadows he cannot escape.
The 1937-born Sheikh knew of the artists of the past but could not connect with them. The slogan of the day was to be here, the moment of modern art. He painted in a flush of frenzy, in an expressionist sort of way. This was a release, but there was great restlessness. When he received the National Award for painting and a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, London, he travelled to England, where op and minimalism were in their heyday but he remained unconvinced about the surface culture of this kind of art. What really moved him were the collections of Indian miniature paintings as well as those of early Italian masters like Piero Della Francesca that he saw in the British galleries. A visit to Italy and a close study of Italian Renaissance art convinced him of its similarity to Indian miniatures.
“I saw that many paintings dealt with the physical world; some even portrayed stark, physical violence. Looking at these paintings filled me with a number of ideas and experiences — some I was able to articulate, others remained latent half-formulated.”
He recalled the murals of Shekhawati in Rajasthan with their strong narrative style and the scroll paintings of Bengal, which called for the crucial participation of the viewer as the animated performer recited the story, and the multiplicity of the traditional forms and images and the boundless energy of the pictures made a deep impact on him. Difference, he found out, was not a sign of disunity. In painting, individual vision was not an exclusive private preserve; it stood out more in sharing than in separation.
On return to India, he saw the past still alive and in interaction with elements of change, unharmonised yet vital. Much
of what he had left behind came back to him — the childhood strangely in the company of new images. He felt that it would
be impoverishing, unreal and artificial to give up anything — even out of a sense of guilt — the kind of naturalism he was taught at the school of art, for they had now become part of his life experience. In his watershed canvas “Returning Home After A Long
Absence,” he juxtaposed a congested row of homes and a fuming factory with angels,
the prophet from a famous Persian miniature and his mother’s portraits, and thus set
the pattern for his paintings to be an extension of his total experience. The exercise was not so much about finding “roots” which
already existed, but about arriving at a language commensurate with an image that was part of the personality.
This was also the time when he travelled a great deal within the country and it was within the vast landscape that he invested his new-found understanding and excitement, sensation and experience. During the journeys, he realized that the familiar horizons gave way and lands that seemed beyond emerged in succession, strangely reminiscent of the landscape in Mughal painting.
As an Indian artist Sheikh himself has reacted strongly to the environment around him, and in his largest painting entitled “City For Sale” (in the collection of the Trustees of the V & A Museum) on which he worked for three years, the main theme is Hindu-Muslim riots, urban brutalisation, its agonies and anguish. His paintings during the Emergency also document his sharp reaction to events and environment.
Then he began a small painting while reading Kathasaritasagar — the Ocean of Stories — with a story of Vetal and King Vikramaditya. The idea was to find a pictorial equivalent for the magic of a story within a story. In a further step in his voyage into myth and autography, Sheikh executed six large paintings titled “Journey”(Pathvipathi) — a continuous panel. Each of the six panels is like a musical composition and their lush green trees, winged horses and various other symbols seem to strike one again and again with a musical fluidity.
“Pathvipath” is marked by an imminent concern with the idea of journey seeking the never-to-be found, and that concern persists in his latest works as well.
Sheikh, a Padma Shri winner, has continuously exhibited in India and abroad. His works were included in the exhibition of Contemporary/Indian Art at the Royal Academy London, and the Hirshhorn Museum Washington. He had a one-way retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He writes on art in Gujarati, Hindi and English and lectures widely in India and Europe.