If
you could not be a painter what would you have done?
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"Nothing,
I could not do anything else. This, this painting, makes my life self-explanatory.
If I draw a line, either it is created by passion or else created by
habit, by faith or by doubt. This work is just myself, not self expression,
my position and my view from my perch. I have found my answer and it
does not change, there are no fashions. If you really find your answer,
you need not change, maybe cannot change. A particular ideology, my
understanding, where I am in the whole cosmos, my relationships with
other elements, confirms my place. I do not speak of the whole cosmos
but of this time, this space, this geo-physical situation. But in another
dimension, you are surely in a state of flux, nothing is fixed, there
are no stable boundaries that define one. All is in flux. No difference
between a dog and a tree or a piece of rock and me. Why? Because neither
knows, really knows anything. I do not know where I've come from and
where I'll go. No rationality. When reason has fled, then there is violence
and self destruction. Criminal emotions are at work. How are we then
different from simply being accidents? We are then nearer to animal
existence and hence my paintings are both animal and human. Man still
has to find his own position. By being rational, by using his intellect."
What makes you happy?
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"Nothing
makes me happy. This torment makes me happy. The fight between my faith
and my doubt. Painting is a rigid, stationary activity. This is static
creativity, no life shaking involvement."
"I have no other purpose. I cannot do any other thing. There is
no other bank of the river for me. There is no greener grass elsewhere.
While deciding my career, I finished school and declared I wanted to
paint. My father, a schoolteacher, gave me biographies of five painters.
After I read them, he asked, you still want to be a painter? Yes, I
replied. So I dived in. I tried not to be inspired by anyone, by any
one-sided view. If you read Marx, the next day you must read Lasky.
See the opposite perspective. Alfred North Whitehead said we should
not see only what Newton saw, we should also see what the falling apple
saw: (Newton probably appeared to be moving up). Gravity and the opposite
of gravity! I am very inspired by Nietzche and involved with deconditioning
the self. We are conditioned for comfort and hence unable to bypass
this human existence and move on to higher supramental realities. Must
everything be tied to being comfortable? Be free for and from comfort.
By exercising the brain, you see what a lazy person can't see. My painting
makes people exercise their brain."
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He
spoke of how his father pressed a coin in his palm and then took it
away. What remained? Nothing, said Chiru. His father said he was wrong
because what had remained was the impression, it was not nothing. "Does
nothing remain of all our experiences? No, the feeling remains. No love
ever disappears because its memory remains. Is this something we come
with?"
"What we have come to is the 21st century, at this moment the last
and final product of evolution, vilified and glorified at the same time.
I agonize that we simply exist, do not know anything more and do not
even have the faculty to know anything more."
Is there no entry then to the next stage of
evolution?
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"Perhaps
by really exercising our brains and stretching what faculties we do
possess."
I see his work around us: somber often, a dividing line, a ridge, torn
borders, a dreadful feeling, a little melancholy. "Life is layers
of sorrow. Yes, it seeps in. Is there life after life? The advent of
supramental man is very important. Unless we know more, how will we
become supramental? Unless we develop, how will we learn that our current
faculties are inadequate? We need a 180 degree change." We spoke
then about the Buddha for he had left all his karma behind and said,
I must know if there is anything more and must know it now.
“Ultimately the main subject of my painting remains the abuse
of the mind and body by humans, making us very near to simply existing,
very hedonistic, very animalistic. We badly need the next great mutation.”
Do
you enjoy being unhappy?
"Yes,
because I have realized, (in a very hard and painstaking way), what
I needed in life. We should not waste our life just being alive, in
conceptual happiness, for then the curtain falls."
I
left with the question I had come with: We who come with a death sentence
from the moment we are born, how then with willful abuse of our already
limited faculties, how then do we go on to becoming supermen?
