| "There has to be
a certain freshness and newness in one's art, otherwise
it's pointless to pursue it. To be different means doing
something you have never done before." Born in
a small Punjabi town of Dhuri in 1941, Manjit Bawa wasn't
exactly encouraged to be an artist. "My mother
would try to dissuade me, saying art was not a means
of livelihood. But my spiritual leanings dispelled my
fears. I had no qualms. I believed God would provide
me with food and I would earn the rest," he says.
It was Bawa's older brothers who backed him up. He studied
fine arts at the School of Art, New Delhi between 1958
and 1963, where his professors included Somnath Hore,
Rakesh Mehra, Dhanaraj Bhagat and B.C. Sanyal. "But
I gained an identity under Abani Sen. Sen would ask
me to do 50 sketches every day, only to reject most
of them. As a result I inculcated the habit of working
continuously. He taught me to revere the figurative
at a time when the entire scene was leaning in favor
of the abstract. Without that initial training I could
never have been able to distort forms and create the
stylization you see in my work today," recalls
Bawa. Between 1964 and 1971, Bawa worked as a silkscreen
printer in Britain, where he also studied art. "On
my return I faced a crisis. I asked myself, 'What shall
I paint?' I couldn't be just another derivative of European
style of painting." Instead, he found Indian mythology
and Sufi (school of Islam) poetry. "I had been
brought up on stories from the Mahabharat, the Ramayan,
and the Puranas (Hindu mythological and sociological
texts), on the poetry of Waris Shah (a Punjabi poet)
and readings from the Granth Sahib (holy book of the
Sikhs)," he says. Manjit Bawa's canvases are distinguishable
in their colors - the ochre of sunflowers, the green
of the paddy fields, the red of the sun, the blue of
the mountain sky. He was one of the first painters to
break out of the dominant grays and browns and opted
for more traditionally Indian colors like pinks, reds
and violet. "We have been bought up on a staple
of ochres, grays and browns in art, thanks to the British.
That's why when I began using bright colors the reaction
was negative," points out Manjit, "but I persisted.
I have been criticized for my 'ice cream' colors for
years, but they come out of the same Winsor and Newton
tubes that other painters use. Bright colors are closer
to the heart of most Indians, familiar as they are with
these shades. " Nature also plays inspiration here.
When young, he would travel widely either on foot, by
bicycle or simply, by hitchhiking. "I have been
almost everywhere - Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat.
I would spread a sheet of paper on the ground and draw
the countryside. The colors and the simplicity of people
I met fascinated me." Birds and animals make a
constant appearance in his paintings, either alone or
in human company.
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