USHA RAPPANGE BHALLA
Illuminating meeting of cultures
That Usha Rappange Bhalla would in the process of her artistic explorations discover a new manner of painting was perhaps to be predicted. She is constantly searching for a means of visualizing a conception of the world, driven by her personal relationship with the world around her. It lay in her path, as it were, and it was only a matter of time before she made her artistic discovery. All that was needed was a fateful coalescence of insight and opportunity that challenged her pictorial capabilities. Her acceptance of this challenge will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her oeuvre.
Her initial approach to painting has now gained greater depth. Working in this classic discipline, she seems to have found a rich source of inspiration upon which to draw, one which uses colour to achieve exceptional effect. In recent years she has created several series of small paintings, each one of them bearing a clear relation to the large canvasses with which she shook up the art world on past occasions. These smaller paintings radiate a sense of intimacy, but also of concentrated energy; they act as icons of a global culture, in which the desire for harmony finds its expression in form and colour. Yet theirs is a harmony that glows with inner intensity.
If one had to name the new technique to which Usha Bhalla has turned her curiosity to such disarming effect, it would be best to generalize with a description like ‘painting on glass’. But this hardly suffices. In fact, it immediately gives rise to a misconception, for it may bring to mind the 1970s European fad that called forth a flood of reverse-glass paintings, with rustic scenes that seemed more the birthright of the Balkans. Usha Bhalla’s glass paintings have nothing in common with those folkloric effusions. And yet she does paint on glass, making the description on the whole apt. When the artistic capabilities of Usha Bhalla are paired with this technique, however, the composition that results is entirely different, suggesting myriad references to her personal life experiences and to the cultural history of her natal land of India.
The latter are rooted in her visual memory of glass artwork in the eighteenth-century palaces of India’s maharajas; a cultural milieu that was the measure of the power and social influence of the ruling elite. Her reminiscences are proof once again of how this artist allows herself to be inspired by a boundless wellspring of cultures in the course of her creative explorations. For it is not only these memories and experiences that are expressed in her glass art, but equally the aesthetics and culture that she has assimilated in Europe, which resonate like a counterpoint voice in Usha Bhalla’s meditative and musical art.
That Usha Bhalla has chosen smooth, translucent glass as the canvas upon which to draw trails of a fluent narrative is the result of a fortuitous experience during a recent commission. She was asked to create an artwork for the top level, just underneath the glass roof, of the Atrium building in Amsterdam’s Zuidas business district, where Indian IT giant TATA Consultancy Services has its European headquarters. It is the kind of commission that hones the intuitive capacity. She would not have achieved the result she did had she not received free reign as an artist. Here, as everywhere – and, in fact, precisely in such a commission as this – she reveals herself as a questing mind, as a woman who, in a manner uniquely her own and without ever denying her roots, is able to make visible her own relationship with the world and with herself. Here, function and personality are one. The artwork in glass, with its sculptural facets, has been moulded into a single fluid whole – both literally and metaphorically. It takes the shape of a decorative, glacier-like, vitreous mass, whose bands of colour invite the eye to absorb it in its entirety. It is an austere translation of the Panta rhei; everything is in flux, amplified visually and auditorially by the thin curtain of water that welds the work into a single sensory whole.
This new work provided the impetus for her further exploration of the potential of painting on a glass support, whether translucent or half-opaque, depending on the composition and purpose. It was the natural progression of a quest in which she was already engaged, and in which glass, shards of colour, specific blends and lighting were to take on an expressive role.
The mind behind this manner of painting is one that not only asks questions, but that also find answers. She seeks an alternative way of looking at ‘the art of painting’. She wants to know how an aesthetic sensibility can be summoned in a world of brick and mortar, at a time when the aesthetic quality of that world is waning and the quietude of visual contemplation is becoming a luxury. Human figures do not occur in her work – at least, not in their familiar and recognizable form – rather, humanity is manifested in its desire for and its imagining of an aesthetic ideal.
Not an endeavour for the faint-hearted, one might say. Yet the result is also pioneeringly beautiful – if it is still acceptable to apply this particular word. Added to this is her view that an artist must dare to take a different approach to the pattern of painting in order to achieve new visual and emotional experience. She holds this beliefin her heart and soul, and we see it reflected in her work. Yet she also realizes the importance of remaining true to her own voice. Her childhood and upbringing were defined by the knowledge that, in the absence of any spiritual teaching authority in her native culture, personal development within the family context was vital.
Usha Bhalla prefers using the small to broach the large. Rather than looking in one direction only, she observes from myriad vantage points, which allow her to see human existence on earth from shifting perspectives. Invariably, the road from one mountaintop to the next requires us to descend into a deep valley. Perhaps it is such mountains and valleys that provide the key: her childhood spent at the foot of the vast and eternal presence of the Himalayas, where she trekked, higher and higher, pausing occasionally at one of the changing views into the distance and encountering new emotions there. It is the mountain that gives us the ability to extend our boundaries ever farther and, at the same time, to survey what we have left behind.
Born in Lahore – then still part of British India – Usha Bhalla’s family was forced to flee the violence of the riots. They later settled in Simla, a city that in her youth was suffused with a certain chic, where old cultures and good breeding went hand in hand, and which was protected by the last British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. Shimla, as it is now known, is the modern-day capital city of the Himachal (province of the Himalaya region). Living there, Usha Bhalla experienced a mixture of cultures from an early age, which contributed to the development of her receptive personality. English was her second native tongue. As a child she attended a school run by the protestant missionaries, and later studied with Belgian nuns at a catholic secondary school. These differences in religion were not considered problematic, not even for the most conservative upper class Hindu families: the Bible at school and Hindu philosophy at home was simply how it was.
Growing up, Usha Bhalla wanted to be a singer – a plan stimulated by her mother, who was well-known as a superb vocalist within the Indian classical music tradition. Ultimately, however, painting proved a deeper passion.
Her intense contact with the awesome nature surrounding her marks the origins of the source from which she continues to draw her inspiration as a painter. Speaking about this in an interview, she remarked that “the sky above the Himalayas has a rarefied, mystical quality, with a boundless, flowing play of silhouettes, shapes and colours that lift the human spirit out of itself.”
Her academic training began in the field of classical vocal music – her mother also held an academic degree – with painting being at first no more than a hobby in which she devoted herself to the refined miniature painting technique that most girls in her milieu practised. She subsequently graduated with a degree in Indian music, English literature and Indian art.
In 1962, Usha Bhalla was offered the unexpected opportunity to study at the Sir John Cass College of Art in London, arranged by the Dutch professor of Hindu philosophy and Sanskrit at the University of London, Dr David Friedman. It was here that she was first exposed to oil paint – a major revelation for the young woman from India. Whereas Indian classical music demanded immense discipline before any free improvisation could be attempted, painting in oils allowed much more freedom in the creative process, and this fascinated her. As such, the choice was not difficult, and her life took a definitive turn.
Her many visits to museums and galleries revealed an entire world of art previously unknown to her. She felt a kindred link with the visions of nature expressed by Turner, Constable and the French Impressionists. But preoccupied as she was at that time with the details of daily life and social obligations, her professional career as a painter would have to wait a while longer. Not until 1970 did this change, with her first triumph being a series of exhibitions in Bombay and Delhi at which nearly all of her paintings were sold. Her success did not go unnoticed in Europe, and led to her return to accept an invitation from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts to work as its resident guest artist. This marked a productive new phase of cross-pollination and laid the basis for her independent artistic career.
During this period of orientation in Antwerp, Usha Bhalla also travelled to the Netherlands, where she met various artists and joined the staff of Radio Netherlands Worldwide to work on cultural programming. At the same time, she had a succession of shows in not only the Netherlands, but also in London, Geneva, Luxembourg, Antwerp and New York City.
That this artist has for many years now made her private domain in Amsterdam does not mean she feels herself irrevocably bound there, notwithstanding her unmatched ability to point out various aesthetic features of this city on the banks of the IJ. As a painter she feels equally at home in New York as she does in Switzerland or India. In much the same way, her family ties crisscross the globe.
Both her larger and smaller paintings are authentic expressions of an exceptional form of abstract expressionism. One has the sense of looking through a very high magnification lens and seeing an unsuspected microcosm of shapes and movements. Her pictorial inventions are unfamiliar and new, exotic and unexpected. By no means has her ‘home’ been swept away; rather, the fertile wind of global cultures has blown through and borne fruit.
The new works that Usha Bhalla has been developing in recent years she has entitled Living Glass. Here, the ancient glass art of traditional India and the groundbreaking works of modern European glass art have proven rich and vital sources. Indian glass art was already famous in the eighteenth century, when it was used to decorate the sumptuous interiors of the palaces of the maharajas. Individual pieces feature religious motifs or graceful, elegant palace scenes in various styles. Usha Bhalla learned the applications of glass art from an established master in the field when she was still a student, and this knowledge was reawakened with the TATA commission. Her one-time fascination for the subtle craftsmanship of glass art, the transparency of the material and the way the play of light effects the colours was roused once again when she saw modern forms of glass art in Europe and encountered the oeuvre of the absolute master in the field, Chihuly, in America.
It is by way of this circuitous route that Usha Bhalla has, in a certain sense, returned to her roots. The integration of ancient techniques with the contemporary artistic potential of painting on glass, the use of transparent liquid pigments, the shifting spectrum of light – an entire complex and adventurous arsenal, in short, was simply awaiting discovery by this artist. She proceeds like a modern-day alchemist, yet never loses sight of the essential nature of painting as an art form. The technical process of creation, the application of layer upon layer while still achieving a transparent effect – these demand utter concentration. There is no margin for error: it has to be right the first time or never. Use of a computer sometimes offers a last resort tool that can be manipulated without blocking spontaneity. Thus tradition and modernity fuse into a visionary scheme.
Adding to the exceptionality of these pieces is the method used for hanging or installation. In the case of traditional paintings, the frame can play a very specific and augmenting role. The same is true here, yet with a novel and ingenious difference: these hanging systems are unique in that they allow the light to touch the surface at various angles, depending upon the viewer’s position. This approach, too, fits into the philosophy of Usha Bhalla. She seeks to give visible expression to the flux of existence – the panta rhei – or, in her words: the spiritual understanding of life.
Frans Duister
Art Critic and Publicist