Street of Art

Every year, for one day, an artery of central Bangalore becomes a direct platform for artists from all over India.

Kumara Krupa Road on Sivananda Circle, central Bangalore, is one of the vanishing visual delights left for wayfarers in the city. Shaped like a snake, with arterial veins, it is neighbours with the Bangalore Golf Course on one side and art houses and cultural institutions on the other. One of the latter is the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. And one day every year for the last seven years, the road has offered itself up for the sake of art. Painters, sculptors, artists, tattoo artists from the deep south to the interiors of West Bengal are let loose for ‘Chitra Santhe’ (picture fair).

“It began with around two dozen artists in 2001,” says T Venkatesh, an organiser with the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. “But over the years, news spread, and we began attracting artistes from all over India—some even from Dubai and Singapore.” This year, the event has logged nearly 5,000 visitors. It displayed the works of nearly 1,200 artists from all over India. On display were Tanjore paintings depicting typical Chola temple facades; pre-modern nudes with mountainous breasts and piercing arioles; Lord Ganeshas staring down at the city; and rural landscapes so tempting you would’ve dived into them straightaway. But this wasn’t all desi stuff. There were Egyptian gods telling you in hieroglyphs that the fair wasn’t restricted to India alone. Not surprisingly, Rajasthani miniatures from the Bikaner school of art hobnobbed with other desert folk from the Middle East and beyond.

“I have been coming here since the very first santhe,” says Gulbarga-based artist and art-teacher Ashok Kumar Hiremath, as he looks at me gaze at one of his semi-nudes. There are families all around us and it brings out the shy side of the man. “Will that get me into trouble?” he asks me looking worried. For a man who has exhibited in Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and most cities of urban India, Hiremath still doesn’t consider himself a big artist. “This event,” he elaborates, “is actually the meeting ground of the lesser-known artists of India. Where will they go? Who will encourage them? How will the buyers know them? I have been painting for the last 25 years. In a mart like this, I become equal to absolute newcomers,” he says pointing to his mid-twenties neighbour from Bikaner, Rajasthan.

I move towards the Bikaneri and learn that Shyam Prasad Singh has been exhibiting at the santhe for the last four years. He specialises in miniatures. “Last year, I sold works worth Rs 25,000 in a day, and took back orders worth Rs 15,000,” he says. “Although like many others here, I have exhibited in galleries, there’s a people-to-people contact here, which is valuable for any artist,” he says in chaste Hindi.

For Kunnhimangalam Jayaram, who tends to his elephants from Kannur enjoying the sun in the painting by my knee, people-to-people contact means something else. “It’s more of a creator-to-buyer contact,” he says. “For a lot of painters who may not have made it big, this event is a boon. We escape the routine of the gallery or show,” he explains. The raison d’etre for the fair.

In the case of the santhe, the sale of the artwork goes entirely to the artist. There are no mediators like galleries displaying the art and obtaining a cut. “What this means,” says a pony-tailed Jayaram who has worked as an illustrator and cartoonist in Saudi Arabia, “is that the pricing of an artwork can be a little lower than what it would be if I were displaying in a gallery or shop,” he says.

Right after the current fair, Karnataka’s Minister for Information Technology and Biotechnology Katta Subramanya Naidu (who launched the event) said the state government planned to construct a ‘Chitra Bhavan’ in the city, where artists from outside could stay and display their work. And that is music to the ears of these artists.

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