Khotachiwaadi

Ranjit usually plans his image, patiently drawing and redrawing smaller details of floating muscled bodies, alien landscapes and aging faces. Carefully selecting an idea of the visual, as if cautiously selecting his language and its words that will float in a landscape of distant remoteness. He likes the act of painting, mixing colours, diluting them with water and applying dabs of olive greens, dark reds, greys and browns with patience, meticulously one stroke at a time, he loves painting ‘real’, getting the wood right or showing age of something that has stood the tests of time, with wrinkled faces, chipped plaster, cracked bones, rusting iron and mottled walls. With his strange ideas of layering he tends to build the image up through thin translucent watery layers of paint that get overlapped one over the other, each layer adding a newer detail till the shimmering sunlight in a house galli or concrete angel bracket detail starts looking more real than real itself.
My attempts at getting myself to plan an image have usually resulted in planned failures. I draw and paint at the same time, instinctively deciding colours and technique sometimes even influenced by colour tubes that are within my arms reach. During the course of development most of my images look like colorful studio accidents, but in due course of time I manage to make an image that tries to communicate what we set out to do. I love painting details; I like to divide my canvas into smaller canvas and then each of those into smaller canvases to show a local market, or a heritage police chowki, a pattern of tiles on wall or a cement mixing truck far away. Being lazy to plan and ignorant about the final image I usually have an advantage of evolving the image based on instinctive concerns or even my mood that day, and the painting grows partly based on me and partly itself as if the image has equivalent control over me.

Khotachiwaadi image is a result of collaboration between Ranjit and me. Ranjit has done the Null bazaar buildings on either side that form the housegalli. Through the slit one catches a glimpse of Khotachiwaadi that has been drawn and painted by me. Two distinctly different conditions within the city get represented through our different methods of drawing and painting with Khotachiwaadi being framed by the Null Bazaar housegalli. As Ranjit works at a more zoomed out level, whereas I draw smaller details the painting requires almost two foci to see it, where the observer can focus either on the housegalli or on Khotachiwaadi.