Canvas, a widely used support for oil paintings and works of other medium, was originally woven from hemp (Cannabis Sativa). In fact, the word canvas is a distortion of the word Cannabis. As time passed, canvas was woven with varied fabrics like linen and cotton while weaving with hemp fibre became rare. Canvas became a preferred support in Europe at least six centuries ago or more. Compared to the brick or stone walls on which murals were done or the wooden supports for sacred paintings, canvas was considered light, flexible, easy to move. When paintings entered from the sacred to the secular domain, artists opted increasingly for canvas.

With the changing tastes in patronage, the surface of the support was also transformed. As pigments began to be synthetically created around the 19th Century, the artists were offered a far greater range of colours. With increased confidence in the handling of material and medium, the artists embarked on an adventurous journey of experimentation with the surface. The history and the chemistry of painting changed the way the canvas surface looked.

While painting on cloths like silk and cotton was a long-standing tradition in India, canvas came to this country with the coming of the European artists from the 18th Century onwards. Many of the visiting painters, who had set up shop in India, had employed traditional Indian artists as assistants to help them with their canvases. Simultaneously, another platform for interaction expanded for the traditional artists when members of the British ruling elite commissioned them to paint portraits, domestic scenes, botanical and ethnological studies, customs and rituals and so on. Their needs for naturalism and perspective influenced the visual language of traditional artists.

The encounter with the aesthetics of European easel painting influenced the demands of the local patrons and they began to look for western style paintings for their own collections. They demanded portraits and religious paintings with the new medium and material and commissioned traditional Indian artists to paint them. As a result, when anonymous traditional artists painted with oil on canvases, an interesting hybrid style emerged from their brush and palettes. Since the early 19th Century, a group of anonymous artists painted with oil on canvas for local patrons. Their subjects were mostly mythological or religious. A large body of such works surfaced in recent years in towns like Chandernagore and Chinsurah, close to Kolkata. Such oil paintings have also been discovered in places like Lucknow, where a flourishing centre of traditional miniature artists existed in the 18th and 19th Centuries. There is a painting of a military general and his wife riding in the park done in oil on canvas by a Lucknow artist that is now in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. No doubt other centres of traditional artists also produced such oil paintings.

These early anonymous oils had an elan about them. The indigenous artists captured the architectural and interior details with animation. They showed a familiarity with naturalism in representation, but they also blended in an element of stylisation in the figuration and the rich details of ornamentations and drapes. Above all, with a versatile genius they learned quickly how to handle the richness of oil paint. At the same time, the brushwork followed the earlier manner of handling gouache. The paint was applied flatly in thick opaque layers. There were not too many highlights. Dramatic contrasts were achieved through light and dark colours.


In the second half of the 19th Century, the character of canvas paintings underwent a sea-change. Signatures became important elements in canvas paintings. Two key factors precipitated this change. One was the arrival of Raja Ravi Varma, a largely self-taught artist, on the scene. Ravi Varma understood very well the shifts in contemporary tastes. The intimacy of earlier miniatures was consigned to family chests and in their place the affluent Indians were ready to adopt the customs and fashions of their colonial masters in their lifestyles and related matters such as decorating the public rooms of their huge colonial-style mansions.

Ravi Varma had acquired a fluency in handling oil paint on canvas and he sensed the growing need of the Indian princes, merchants and a new middle class for paintings to decorate the palatial walls. He understood their desire to make a statement about their status. His mastery over portraiture was inspired by European naturalism, but at the same time he gave the portraits an Indian character in the way he painted skin tones, drapery, ornaments and the way he posed his models.

He also created a genre of history paintings where he depicted mythological scenes on large canvases filled with colour, drama and emotions. The theatricality of these scenes was unprecedented in Indian art and the Indian elite lapped it up, just as they did the productions on the Indian proscenium stage. The canvas paintings opened up new ways of seeing traditional narratives.

The second factor in catalysing a change in canvas paintings was the opening of art schools by the British in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras during the mid-19th Century. Meant to train artisans and craftsmen, the schools ended up training young men from educated, middle-class families and not families of traditional artists. The training of the young men in the academic schools of painting changed the way canvas paintings were made. The artists expanded the genre of images. No longer focusing on religious and mythological scenes, the artists in the early decades of the 20th Century began to paint landscapes, domestic scenes, representations of women in secular context, urban scenes and so on. The artists began to introduce subtleties of light and shade, use highlights, apply light touches of brushstrokes. A.X. Trindade of Bombay had done a painting called 'Pan Patti Shop', where he built up the painting with impressionistic strokes. Some of the painters from Calcutta like Jamini Roy, when he painted in the European academic style, and Hemen Majumdar used paint sensuously to paint landscapes and female forms.

One other artist in the pre-Independence years who used paint distinctively was Amrita Sher-Gil. The way she used saturated colours, the rich reds and browns, the intensity with which they were applied created an unforgettable resonance. Sher-Gil also brought into view the private world of women in their domestic settings. Sher-Gil's use of painted and elongated figuration left a legacy in artists like Haku Shah.

Ramkinkar Baij also painted in oils in the pre-Independence years. His bold brushwork, the voluminous figures, the energetic planes of paint created forceful images. The dynamism witnessed in his oil paintings, similar to the dynamism of his monumental sculptures, pointed to new ways of using the canvas surface.

There were other artists in the pre-Independence years who were experimenting with paint on canvas like the Young Turks group in Bombay and the Calctta Group in Calcutta. These artists brought a whiff of urban technological society in their images. Paritosh Sen, a founder-member of the Calcutta Group, feels that canvas is just another surface for him. Nevertheless, Sen expresses a modern sensibility and refreshing wit in his figuration and use of colours. K.G. Subramanyan, who handles his canvases sensitively, also combines irony with wise understanding of the gamut of human proclivities.

It was in the post-Independence years that a surge of experimentations were carried out on canvas as a surface particularly from the Sixties onwards. The artists tried out white or coloured grounds through which they could control the tones in the painting. Even more significantly, experiments with texturisation were taken to another level. The canvas provided a strong support for the thick layerings of paint. Some like Akbar Padamsee used a palette knife to achieve the impasto effect. Others like F. N. Souza, and closer to our times Arpita and Paramjit Singh, created a tactile surface primarily with brush and thick, viscous use of paint. Amitava Das's paintings belong to the latter category. Satish Gujral works in a grainy texture in his application of glowing colours.

Some of the artists create another surface by introducing a variety of material on the canvas. This trend has accelerated in the last couple of decades. Mona Rai's imagination, for instance, is stirred by kitsch and urban junk. She adds threads, bits of cloths, glittering material in her non-representational paintings that nevertheless distil the vibrancy as well as tawdriness of the urban scene. Urban popular culture has also left its mark on a younger generation of artists like Manisha Gera Baswani among others. Baswani often adds other material as well as repetitive craft techniques to her canvases. Artists like Jitish Kallat impose printed silk screen images on his painted canvases to represent the urban chaos. Memories of urban experiences figure in Sudhir Patwardhan's works depicted in a clear, narrative style. Naina Kanodia brings a naive primitivism in her simplified figuration and use of bright colours in her depiction of urban scenes.

From the Sixties onwards, abstract artists have used the canvas to carry out experiments with pure visual elements like space, paint, brushwork. The austerity of Jeram Patel and Vanita Gupta's paintings are counterpointed with the painterly qualities of Prabhakar Kolte and Kishor Shinde's works. The whimsical autonomy of lines in Sheila Makhijani's paintings is contrasted by the muted or rich fields of colours by artists as different in their approach as Seema Ghurayya and Anwar. Shobha Broota creates a luminous optical illusion that would not have been possible had it not been painted on canvas. John Tun Sein and S Harshavardhana offer examples of texturisation.

The canvas, therefore, has offered artists opportunities of a sturdy support to experiment with visual language over more than a century and a half. In doing so, the artists have evolved their distinctive idioms thereby enriching the whole field of Indian art.

ELLA DATTA
December, 2006