JOURNEY OF AN ARTIST
BOBEN MAMMEN
‘Your work is not only books and pictures. They are but bits of it. Your work is You, not less than you or parts of you. These days when you “cannot work” are accomplishing it, are of it, like the days when you “can work”. There is no division.’
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- Mary Haskell
Looking back, there was not a distinctive day or a certain pivotal moment in life which awoke the art in me. It was a process of evolution and exploration; the deeper I looked within, the more I learnt about the world around me. Through each phase, my understanding of the world and my frame of mind translated into colours and forms. Yet, my paintings still is a window into everything I hold close; from the most vibrant shades of green and red during my childhood to the vast wilderness of Australia, I have experienced in my recent past.
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Born in the southern-most state of India, Kerala, I was...
The financial struggles, societal alienation I faced due to racism and family conflicts were detrimental to my psyche. Beyond these, the gashes maimed by the self-doubt and regret I carried around then from the memories of a comfortable and luxurious life I had left behind, added another dimension to the depth of the murkiness in my painting.
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I took to my art to overcome these dark hours; those paintings exude a sense of conflict from the recess of my mind. The resulting dark palette which is overpowering in those paintings crept in subconsciously, which I realized only years later! This collection of my work originated during my initial years in Australia. It is indicative of the challenges I faced, at the time.
Just like every scar on our body has a story behind it, which we remember as part of our journey; it is only intuitive that we carry marks of the mental wounds we suffered beneath our skin. It might not be visible to the naked eye, but it exists and we bear witness to these scars alone.
I call my current and the latest collection of paintings, Emotional Beast. It reflects on my maturity, which is an outcome of various factors such as my upbringing, spiritual evolution, financial constraints and social struggles. As I look back, I realize how each of these difficult situations overwhelmed me emotionally and brought about a change in the way I think and perceive life, at the time. With time I have reached a space where I can essentially observe my past from an outsider perspective, helping me gauge the shifts in my beliefs and emotional evolution more objectively. I have been able to grasp how the ups and downs of lives define our personality, as my own view of my life turned more subtle and accepting. As I travel deeper in to these planes of human behavior and perceive the meaning of my personal battles, I reach for my brush voluntarily as words can express only so much!
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One thing I am certain of, is the colour palette which informs of my overwhelming emotional conflicts and the resulting transformation, should be natural. The shades of red and green that I use are as organic as my thought process and my feelings.
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These are also instinctively influenced by the hues of the landscape as well as the organic shades used in the traditional ritualistic art forms of the place I was born into and grew up in. The red in Theyyam and green in Kadhakali, two of the popular ritualistic traditional performance art forms of Kerala (the Southernmost state in India) are crucial to the performance of these art forms. I aspire to continue visualizing the relevance and energy of my evolved emotional maturity using these bold shades.
It has amazed me how an output of an advertising campaign, mostly the joint effort of multiple stakeholders- writing copy, drawing illustration and then designing lay out, generally don’t outlive a period of a fortnight, many a times. Many of these visuals are short lived, however as a realistic painting, it overcomes this constraint and can eternize a moment. It was the work of the noted American illustrator, Norman Rockwell, which opened my eyes to this possibility. In his time, he created several visuals as part of different advertising campaigns. However these illustrations became iconic with time, and are immortalized as they offer a window to the way of American life at that time. Many of his paintings are recreated and even reimagined as posters even today; this clearly shows how paintings can raise beyond the transient lifespan of an advertising campaign and be part of a much larger diaspora of art. This woke me up to the possibilities and potential of real life illustrations. Even though I couldn’t trace many of my work of the past, I realize that these skills still reside within me; hence as part of my exploration of self, I look within and delve deeper to recreate certain memories in an attempt to breathe an eternal life to one moment, at a time.
I relish creating realistic paintings, also enjoy watching other artists’ realistic art. Over my long career of Advertising, illustrations and photography have captured a significant part of my imagination. This process of framing a particular moment in life, thus preserving it for eternity, has always appealed to me!