Artist Kota Neelima shares with Rupinder Kaur the process of creating her artworks which begin with questions followed by research
Artist Kota Neelima calls herself a collector of questions. She has been doing so for her whole life, collecting queries from various places and people. She credits those questions for helping her create her artwork, books and other writings. But Neelima is not looking for answers.
We sit here at the India Habitat Centre, surrounded by her works titled ‘What The Eyes Can See’ which she shares was completed in two-and-a-half years. “Around six months for each painting,” she tells us.
Her creative process begins with a question which are timeless and have bothered generations followed by intense research.
“luckily, we don’t have the time to find answers. One would ask what is the purpose of life, why do we have to be so sad when something doesn’t work out or why is it that the things we want the most, don’t come to us easily. We are not the first ones to think of these things. There are some deeper questions like they say everything has an effect. You do something and it has an effect, is it just karma or good and evil or is there something beyond thisIJ These are also the questions which have been there forever and some of them have been passed on from our ancestors like a precious heritage. Although every generation, author, thinker and even an ordinary person may have found some answers but we have to find our own answers. Because you will not accept anything unless you’ve experienced it,” she explains.
After her last exhibition in 2012, Neelima was in search of her next project when she came across the idea of a ‘visual’.
“We underestimate the visual, which is what we see. I decided to see what the Indian texts say about it. One of the most interesting lines I came across was in the Gita where lord Krishna says to Arjun that he would show him the entire world which is within him, but Arjun would not be able to see it with his mortal eyes so he tells him let me give you the eyes to see. It then occurred to me that there are very restricted ways of seeing, but it can be improved and also that maybe I am looking at everything around me only in a certain way. Communication is very subjective. What is true for you may be different for me that why we focus on facts. But when you focus on facts, you miss out on a lot of truth,” Neelima tells us.
It was then a phrase from the Kena Upanishad ‘What makes the eyes seeIJ’, stating that the eye is not the one which is choosing a target but there is some other force which made her halt her research work and ponder over the philosophical question. This also resulted in the quotes that accompany each of her art works. When one stands in front of her work titled Childhood Home, one gets a view of a galaxy with its stars. The quote with it reads: “Under a million stars, Where a billion rebellions start. A childhood home calls, To play again in its yard.”
“There is a brilliant answer in the question and I wanted us to find a contemporary answer or at least see the question in a contemporary light. So when I started thinking of that I wrote these quotes with the paintings,” she informs.
This was followed by working on the themes of each work. “One I was through the outline of what I wanted to say in each work, I knew that I was ready to sketch. I sketch using charcoal which are very two-dimensional so it takes a while to get the third dimension out and I make about 15-20 sketches for each painting. But unless I feel personal about that message which I want to paint, I would not approach a canvas. It is a huge, long, and a tedious process,” Neelima, who has also authored three books says.
The paint on the canvas looks sculpted on but Neelima shares that she doesn’t use a metal scalpel but a brush to give her landcapes which gives one a sense of movement.
“One of the things that I do is that before I begin my work on a canvas is that I would touch and say thank you for letting me work on you and let’s have a conversation. Rather than just me trying to impose a form, draw something and fill it up with colours. I am not creating a product, I’m creating a conversation and there has to be some kind of consensus between me and the work. When I feel that canvas, it is a little warm, it is responsive almost like skin and to use a metal scalpel is something I can’t do. I also use fingers to mould the paint,” she tells us.