I waited for her in the courtyard of Prado Museum in Madrid on a winter morning. Tina Bandringa, my Dutch artist friend was supposed to meet me. We were going to see one of the greatest works in the history of art, Goya’s Maja. An inimitable nude painting.
Tina walked in with her vivacious and adorable smile. She is a sculptor who was on a trip to India to work at ‘Garhi’—the National Academy’s community studios for artists in Delhi where we met. Tina basically did human figure drawings, including her own figure in nude. But her figurative sculptures are more stylised than her direct sketches. She did a lot of figure studies using generally her male friends.
We are meeting after years by sheer coincidence. I was in Spain to attend a show of Indian artists. Tina landed up at the opening. We decided to meet the next day and go to see the legendary painting that surprisingly she had not seen.
Ever since I first landed in Madrid on a foggy morning in the 1980s, I have seen Maja many times, yet I felt that I am seeing the painting for the first time. “What do you find so attractive in this painting?” asked Tina. “I cannot explain the actual feeling that is evocated by looking at it,” I said. But there is something irresistible in this kind of a painting. A kind of an elation that is heady, pulsating, amusing and at times, accelerating. There is a spiritual dimension, as your mind becomes one with the creative dimensions of a work like this. It is the same you feel when you see the Buddhist murals of Ajanta or the Sistine chapel fresco Genesis by Michelangelo. The creative dimension that is achieved when the mind and body of the artist become one with the subject he is working with. The true spiritual union of a man and woman as described by the countless sacred books and treatise across the civilisations highlight this factor. It’s the union of the soul and body from which a great work of art is born. For a connoisseur, the creation becomes a treat for the soul and eyes. I explained this to Tina and she seemed to agree with my thoughts.
As an art student when I did nude studies in the life-study class, it was fun and a lot of hard work as we were trying to perfect the art of life studies from models. This is a fundamental training for aspiring artists. It is a basic training in observing and studying the subject and learning to capture the figure and the dimensions as fast as one could do. Teachers stressed on this point as much as they stressed on achieving the resemblance. Everyone from Michelangelo to a minor artist goes through this practice. Artists undergo a lot of creative struggle to depict a nude of a male or female. I know a number of women artists who exclusively paint their own body. It is a lot of hard work and has nothing to do with sex or individual ego. They treat their body like any other subject they attempt. The aim is aesthetic satisfaction and creative integrity. It is hard work and struggle to find the ultimate goal and creative perfection.
Michelangelo found a discarded marble block by another artist that he imagined contains the image of that mythical hero, David. He attempted to show David in his true form as God almighty created him and all of us. His chisel, hammer, body and soul went to work on that eighteen feet block for over three years.
The result was the sculpture of David standing in glorious nudity at the Academia in Florence today.
— Arakkal is a renowned artist