The use of ‘pure line’ to delineate contours -

The art of drawing – is an act of demarcation, when and where a space-time continuum splits white from white, celebrating union and division. The aesthetic judgement does not discriminate between joy and anguish, between pleasure and pain, both are areas of experience. The artist stops watching and begins observing. Observing is sighting with a pre-established programme. A choice is exercised between the included and the excluded. However, both particitpate in defining the face of the visible. The two aspects enter into dialogue – interpenetrating spaces, trangressing boundaries, violating a symphony of shared commonality. The image is an embodiment, an act of nomenclature. The artist may reproduce what he has seen; he may represent what he observed, he may project a mental configuration. His culture, his concept of order, his imagination, will transform these into a state of ‘otherness’. The momentum which drives him to start is causeless or if there is a reason, it is trivial – the big moments of history are recorded by small talents. If the bombing of a village produced Guernica, the entire World War was consecrated to painting still lifes with tomato plants and pots and pans. “The apple can be as revolutionary as a gun.” Experience in general and visual experience in particular are prior conditions without which no expression through plastic means is possible. Not a sudden spurt of inspiration, but a kind rhythmic breathing over periods of time, a sinking inwards, a state of absorption, when the uttermost point of sensibility, endowed with the gift, both of gratification and second sight, reveals and conceals the flight of textures, planes, tonalities, colours. The performer lives at split-levels – both doer and watcher, horse and rider, the functions fused, boundaries merged, an interlocking of bodies, many and one. Someone who has the sensibility to enjoy looking at a work of art knows the intense power the work conveys. The sense-data that the eyes communicate to the mind, when deciphering the works in a book, these same eyes become illiterate, looking at a painting. The language systems are different. It is a veritable Tower of Babel. The infinite distance, between sound waves and the colour spectrum is the true distance between eyes and ears. It is their proximity which is an illusion.

Akbar Padamsee.

(Excerpt from ‘Akbar Padamsee – Works on Paper – Critical Boundaries, published by Pundole Art Gallery , 2004)