Mangaluru: “Conditioning is the enemy of creativity; working out of habit is harmful to the artist,” said L. N. Tallur, internationally renowned visual artist. “It is a professional hazard for an artist to draw or paint out of habit. Due to the everyday demands and pressures of life, we tend to standardise our work and establish an easy delivery process. When this happens, we get into a comfort zone, stop observing and creating, which is the foundation of art,” he added.
He was in conversation with art historian, Nemiraj Shetty during a live interaction session held on Sunday February 27 as a part of ‘ParamPrateeka’, a unique art festival that commemorates the completion of 27 years by Prasad Art Gallery, Mangaluru.
Answering a question about how the outside world views Indian art, Tallur, who divides his time between his native town of Tallur near Kundapura and his adopted city of Seoul in South Korea, said, “Indian art is given some space on the world stage, but enjoys no real significance.” He explained that Indian artistic traditions suffer from a labour oriented process that does not encourage thinking. “Much of our art was designed by the British who did not want thinkers, but labourers. Hence even our thinking became labour based. As a result, our artists suffer from inferiority in the company of other professions,” he said.
He offered self-analysis as the solution to overcome this problem. “Every morning we brush our teeth out of habit. Artists similarly paint the sky out of habit without really observing the sky. Hence, we should be deliberate in our thinking and actions; in our everyday encounters of accident and chance, we should observe, experience and improve. No matter what we do, we should parallelly also do a lot of thinking,” he said added.
‘ParamPrateeka’ is being hosted at Prasad Art Gallery founder Koti Prasad Alva’s spacious residential compound at ‘Ram Prasad’, Kodialguthu East Road, Mangaluru. The event showcases art in three categories: (1) Exhibition of Artifacts and Antiquities, (2) Competition of Installation Art titled ‘Paramprateeka’ and (3) Exhibition of works by 27 reputed senior Artists. The art festival will continue till February 28 from 9.30 am to 7.30 pm.
