Studio Visit: Artist Tanul Vikamshi

Nisha Aggarwal visits Nagpur based painter and social activist, Tanul Vikamshi at his studio and comes out with the following observations about his life and art.

Amidst all the chaos- of fluctuating art market, rise and fall of optimism and despair, I see the serene face of Tanul Vikamshi, a Nagpur based artist. I met Tanul through his brother and artist Lalit Vikamshi whom I had met in an art camp in Goa. He took me to meet his brother. Tanul had come to receive us at the Nagpur Railway station; a rare courtesy these days shown by the artists. On the way to his studio, Tanul was all animated and happy while talking about the city and later about contemporary art scene in India.

Artist Tanul Vikamshi at his Studio in Nagpur

I met Tanul at his studio the next morning. I was gazing at one of his large canvases for a long time as he entered the studio. Tanul is not a painter by training. He studied sculpture from Sir.J.J.School of Art in Mumbai in 1993. Brother Lalit also studied sculpture though both of them actively pursue a career in painting. Their sculpture gene comes from their father who too was a sculptor. Man proposes and fate or destiny or god, call it anything, disposes. Tanul was a happy student at J.J.School. But his studies were cut short by an accidental fall from a tree. He was plucking mangoes for his teachers. The fall rendered him paralyzed below waist for some time and he had to leave Mumbai and cut short his studies. Finally, he finished graduation in sculpture from Khamgaon, an institution famed for sculpture studies. Later he took a masters degree in painting from Nagpur University in 2003.

Tanul does not feel bad about his change in career. Had it not been the fall he would have definitely pursued a career in sculpture. But today he paints regularly without heeding a bit about the changing graphs of the art market. He never thought of living in a metro city to make his career flourish. Currently he is a Co-founder/director of Alag Angle Studio in Nagpur, an initiative that aims to bring out budding artists in various genre of visual arts. Alag Angle and its students also work in the field of social awareness while collaborating with various other organizations and projects.

The significant projects undertaken successfully by Alag Angle Studio are ‘Hamari Nag River’ supported by Norwegian Embassy and Khoj Studios, Delhi, ‘Gram Art Project’ in Paradsinga Village, Madhya Pradesh and ‘I have a Dream Project’ by Vancouver Biennale. Tanul has exhibited in various parts of the world as a solo artist.

Tanul’s art and life reflect his never say die attitude. For him sky is the limit. In his earlier works, he repeatedly paints the image of a gate. According to him, it was an opening to the world and through which he could measure the world beyond, sitting on a wheel chair. Depending on his mood, the gate appeared either opened or closed. Another important image of that time was ‘car’. For Tanul car represented the pace of thinking, its maneuverability and its elegance. Between gates and cars there are always textured stones as another link image. Tanul says that a stone is a metaphor for the primitive imaginative capacity of human beings. They symbolize massiveness and solidity.

A Work by artist Tanul Vikamshi

Tanul paints mostly acrylic on canvas and on paper in monochromatic shades. However his color palette is teeming with brighter hues in the recent works. The melancholy of his earlier works is now fading and erupting into more lively shades of imagination. These are midway between abstraction and figuration. For Tanul the act of painting is similar to creating space that allows viewers to travel within. The textures are like various sojourn points essential for navigation into various directions and searching into the soul of the space/painting. The absence of the textures would limit this journey of viewers to the surface only. The tenuous presence of feminine figures is a metaphor of the energy/strength and Scorpions are of the artist himself. The sculptural outlook of these figures are evident of the artist’s earlier training in sculpture which now he could release only into his paintings. Tanul says he cannot resist doing it as it is a subconscious manifestation.

Of late the artist has begun to think about the balance created out of various counterparts in life or in different things. He delineates it through the machinery as it functions properly due to correct operation of its internal fittings. Here the artist’s endeavor is to understand the function of machinery which could give insights to human beings to make their lives ‘existent’, just like Tanul’s own life gives.

Image Courtesy: The Artist

(First Appeared Online in CartanArt Magazine, Issue-I, June 2014)