THE ART YOGI: SUHAS SHILKAR

‘It’s not about beauty, it’s about intensity and how the texture, line, colour, form, marks etc. interact with each other within the space,’ says Suhas Shilkar, who had put on display his latest abstracts titled, ‘Between Despair and Illumination’ at the ‘Sunaparanta – Goa Centre For The Arts’.

Intensity is what nudged Suhas to enroll for the Fine Arts degree course at the Goa College of Art much against his parent’s reservation and dismay. This bold decision in the late seventies did throw up challenges and trepidation. Suhas took the challenge head-on and survived to create a special space for him in the art world.

‘My tryst with the art world began much earlier in my childhood with the introduction of various prints of noted abstract artists such as Joan Miro and others,’ explains Suhas. ‘It was an exhibition, in the mid seventies, of abstract drawings, at the Institute Menezes Braganza Hall, based on the poems of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, by Vamona Ganesh Navelkar, that triggered an urge in me to follow this direction.’

Thirty years is a long time, and Suhas has weathered the rough and the smooth with equanimity of a yogi who is on the path of self-discovery and enlightenment. Abstract art is a religion and a spiritual path for Suhas, and as such he refrains from intellectualizing his piece of creations. He prefers the onlooker to grow their understanding with the artwork.

Suhas Shilkar’s complex looking formulations with vague line here, a bold swoop of paint there and seemingly illegible scribble somewhere along yet intelligently loaded abstract picture make the onlooker probe a little more seriously.

‘For me painting is visual music meant not to evoke only specific moods but having multiple interpretation, that is in other words defining my paintings as almost something so that it could be many things and anything,’ states Suhas. This liberal approach and the enigmatic character of his out and out abstract paintings leaves scope for multiple interpretations and viewpoints. This leads him to shun the idea of titling his individual works and straightjacket the interpretation. He prefers fluidity and ambiguity. This nudges the viewers to extrapolate and discover varied possibilities.

Suhas’ process follows a cascading form with the first stroke navigating into the next and still more additions where every step determine the next, until he feels satisfied with the outcome. Innovative methods and experimentations fill the space between the blank virgin canvas and the completed final piece of art. 

His recent Europe tour added to his interest in incorporating graffiti elements. Suhas feels that to be an evolutionary process in his journey on this path maintaining, along the way, the same incoherent lines, blobs of pigment, flash of virgin space and ambiguous figures.

However, the latest show, titled, ‘Between Despair and Illumination’ reinforces, this writer’s conclusion, that Suhas is a yogi in the field of art. If ‘equanimity is yoga’ then Suhas paints in spite of the extremes of despair on account of failure and illumination lead by success.

The show was on view in December of 2012.