№ 01Process · Figure & Edges · 2020
How Figure & Edges were made.
One journey, two series. The Figure Series came first. The Edges Series broke out of its margins. Bengaluru, February to August 2020, in the order it happened. On 6 July the page turns dark, because the canvases did.
“My paintings cannot be photographed as they refuse to be turned to mere images. They are bodies that confuse ideas and realities.” Raghava KK · 2020
Two failures, early 2020.
Outside: March 2020. Commissioned work worth half a million dollars, cancelled in one call. Weeks later, lockdown.
Inside, the real problem: the work had become formulaic. A recognisable composition, a digital-to-canvas pipeline that ran reliably without its maker. Even my unpredictability became predictable. The work no longer surprised the person making it.
The cancellations only removed the excuse. The formula was already the problem. Also in the house: his brother, the art critic Dr. Karthik Kalyanaraman, back in Bengaluru, starting over at the same time.
Before any painting: a critic.
An artist alone cannot escape his own formula. So the first step was a structure of three people, with Dr. Karthik as the critic. Its objective: examine the history of the work, critique the current body, and arrive, through the process itself, at something more original.
Spray works, and the Toy Trojan.
The record opens with aerosol on canvas, and the Toy Trojan: a 300-year-old mahogany from Java, carved and sprayed pink. Painting already moving toward the object.
Who is Raghava?
A whiteboard and a question. How I see myself; how others see me; what the practice says about me regardless of what I intend.
It ended in three words: play, pain, the construction of identity. Everything after this is tested against them. The aesthetic is built to carry them.
Raghava vs Picasso.
Guernica, printed large in black and white and laid on the floor. First its characteristics; then the harder question: where, precisely, is the disagreement? The exercises that follow are built from the answer.
Exercises on paper.
The critic sets prompts; the maker answers on paper. Pen and watercolour: a horse, a bull, a mother and child. Dated like lab entries.
First oils. Wanted for twenty years, avoided for twenty years.
Oil is what the masters used; it demands proficiency. No art school, a career built in acrylic and pixels. Impasto both exciting and frightening. That was the reason to choose it. These are the first oil paintings of his life.
No figure permitted. Identify which marks worked; keep only those. The kept marks become the style vocabulary, built before it is allowed to describe anything.
The new style follows a form.
The prompt: use the newly created style to follow a form. Mickey, the Devil, Cuphead, rebuilt in the new vocabulary. The pencil beside the oil shows the distance travelled.
Painting over the print.
The digital Guernica composition, the old pipeline’s product, printed archivally on canvas, then painted over by hand in the new language. The old way underneath, the new way on top.
Essay: my relationship with art.
Written mid-process, published later in MARG. The essay states the position the work is being built on: art and life need opposite mindsets, and within the confines of a series, integrity can have very specific goals.
Read the pages · My relationship with art (pdf)Question → incubation → attempt → silence → critique.
The working rhythm, February to August: Dr. Karthik poses a question. Days of journaling, no painting yet. Then the attempt. Then silence: nobody judges fresh work. Then the critique. Then the next question.
The delays are the point: they break the reflex that produces formula. And nobody steers toward an outcome. The loop has questions and a filter, but no destination.
The Figure Series.
Canvases weekly through June and early July, characters carrying the three words. The palette is written down on June 25, after it has proved itself. From the journals: formula → lazy → broken. Every work treated as an individual.
Essay: painting with oils.
Twenty-one written observations on the material itself, made after three months inside it. The medium studied as a subject.
“Every stroke of a brush, every mark of the knife is left behind beautifully… When you scratch thick paint, the marks look like wounds. The knife slips easily, creating very bold, confident accidents.”
“The paintings made from oil paints tell the story of their creation. Every stroke that went into creating a visual effect can be studied.”
The first born: fifteen canvases.
The series the whiteboard produced first. Characters carrying the three words, painted May to July. The impasto thickening at their edges is what became the second series. Tap a work to see it large.
The AsuraOil on canvas · May 11
The GeneralOil on canvas · May 21
Zen3.5′ × 2.5′ · Oil on canvas · June 2
The Amazon Wilderness6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · June 5
The Magician6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · June 5
The Green MonsterOil on canvas · June 5
The Vomiting RainbowOil on canvas · June 14
The DogOil on canvas · June 17
Daffy Duck3′ × 2′ · Oil on canvas · June 17
Mickey riding a horse6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · June 27
The Smurfs3.5′ × 2.5′ · Oil on canvas · June 29
Man’s Red Flower6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · July 2
Mickey6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · July 2
The Upside Down Woman6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · July 6
Grey and Yellow6′ × 4′ · Oil on canvas · July 6
The first Edges work.
A small diptych, 18 × 11 inches each. Unplanned. The impasto that had been building along the edges of the figurative canvases stops being a side-effect and becomes the subject. The edge, the ridge of paint, the side of the object, the part a photograph cannot capture, becomes the work. The second series is born.
The First Diptych.
The journals had already written the demand: painting as image object. An edge cannot be reproduced. It has to be seen in person.
The first large work.
Next day: the first large Edges canvas, 6 × 4 feet, marks on black. The critic’s reaction, kept in the record: this is fresh, this is original.
Journal: painting as body.
The day after the first large work, the thinking is written down: the painting as a body, with twenty-seven experiment ideas for what a body can do.
“An encounter with a painting is like an encounter with a person. The painting has body and spirit.”
“My stand: move away from painting as image → painting as object.”
The series, weekly.
Goosebumps. The Monkey. The installation work. The critic inspects; the silence rule holds. In the journals, display is already being sketched: works laid flat on platforms, canvases inclined, viewing ramps, because “the work has to look good from all sides, there is no one direction to see the work.”
Read the pages · Display of the Edges (pdf)
The family enters the work.
The subjects come from inside the house: Jayamma, a triptych. Mother’s work. Rudra. Aadya. Anaga. Jaya. Play, pain, and the construction of identity, painted as the people who constructed his.
How am I different?
Two research lists, eighteen names from a friend, nine of the maker’s own, Auerbach to Joan Mitchell to Altmejd, each examined in writing against one question. The notes are blunt: more abstract than Auerbach. A strong body connection to Altmejd. Schulnik has painted on edges, but not as the main feature.
My truths, and the ultimate other.
Two texts close the journals: ten working truths written on July 31, and notes on the ultimate other, August 2.
“Every work of mine has to be an individual with a complex, beautiful personality.”
“Have the humility to know that you have absolutely no clue how your work will be received. Just be prepared to stand by it.”
Bios vs Zoe · The Positive · The Negative.
The last recorded canvases: Bios vs Zoe, and a diptych: The Positive, The Negative. Then, August 6: one day of sorting. Top candidates, secondary works, the rest let go.
At one point I felt: I have arrived at something. Right. Full stop.
After the series.
Selection: one day, every work sorted. Display: platforms, inclines, ramps, worked out on paper, because the works read from all sides. The catalogue: made after the series was finished.
Nine canvases.
The second series: black grounds, ridges of oil, titles that ask questions. Tap a work to see it in the studio.
How would you tell a story from the margins?48″ × 72″ · Oil on canvas
The presence of the beloved’s absence.72″ × 48″ · Oil on canvas
Can a landscape be miniaturized?12″ × 16″ · Oil on canvas
Is erotic attraction reducible to physics?72″ × 48″ · Oil on canvas
What kind of body do you possess in a dream?72″ × 48″ · Oil on canvas
Can you easily organise bodies into types?48″ × 36″ · Oil on canvas, diptych
Can you be friends with your clone?24″ × 24″ · Oil on canvas, diptych
If my body were opened up, what would you see?72″ × 48″ · Oil on canvas
Is a dead body a body or a thing?72″ × 48″ · Oil on canvas