A world of movement and colour

Over a period of time, Seema Ghurayya has achieved a poise and elegance in her work rarely met with among young artists. ANJALI SIRCAR profiles the artist.

SEEMA GHURAYYA'S art awareness, free from all material involvement, seems to be a miracle. Mysterious, pure and intimate, her colour perception is, without any doubt, her own personal spiritual quest. Charged with a strange inner light, the space in these works is invested with a divine presence like a temple of prayer. S. H. Raza, India's eminent artist based in Paris, says in an assessment of Ghurayya's work: "In my opinion, hers is a significant achievement in the context of contemporary Indian painting."

Ghurayya begins with the renunciation of a recognisable image, destroying direct references to natural appearances. She uses frugal means and dispenses with extravagance and excess altogether. Her expressions of incommunicables such as silence, lightness, airiness, storm - all express themselves without ceasing to be mysterious. Her art, therefore, is but the vital graph of her own operations and a constant translation of all her emotions into convincing pictorial sensations.

Her work places her in the line of the abstractionists, who are stirred by the first principles of drawing. With linear forms as her companions, she opens out a world of movement and colour - the polarisation of light - with quiet exuberance. Distillation being one of the key processes involved in the constitution of a certain kind of abstract painting, it is primarily a means whereby she secures the purity of sign. The accent here is on economy, the concentration on the bare essential.

Pruned and pared, Ghurayya's linestrip performs the role of the syllabic notation, emphasising as it does, the simple sophistication of her approach. Along with the crumpled floating clip form, the linestrip militates against the walls of the square colour-blocks in which it is set. The movement that is produced seems to possess an accommodating quality of depth, as one sees the vibrating linestrips and the resonating clipforms reflecting each other in a whimsical game of convergences and divergences.

Ghurayya, born in Gwalior in 1964, was a student of science in school. Her father wanted her to be a doctor, but her elder brother, who was inclined towards art, was able to grasp Ghurayya's unspoken interest in art, and convinced her parents to allow her switch on from science to art. She joined the Fine Arts College in Gwalior and took her national diploma in painting in 1986. She also joined the printmaking workshop of the Roopankar Museum of Fine Arts. Over a period of time, she was able to achieve a poise and elegance in her work rarely met with among young artists. Her abstractions resounded with the rhythm of a musical scale: through the deft juxtaposition of bands of tonalities, she set up resonances of great significance. There was something precious and chaste in her work. The late J. Swaminathan, remarked about her work at that point: "Though totally different from the work of Nasreen Mohamedi, Seema Ghurayya brings a somewhat similar precision and clarity to her work."

After experimenting with lithography for sometime, the artist moved on to painting on canvas. Whatever the medium and material be, Ghurayya's work celebrated the "graphic quality". She loved the sensitivity of paper, its touch and feel and preferred to use oil also on paper, applying colour with a roller or a hard paper surface. She worked further on with the use of precise tools for stenciling and marking, mixing pencil, crayons and sharp ink or pure incised lines in an intermittent weave during the process of her development. Restricting the use of colours to blacks, ochres, greens and blues, the prominent white remained the light or the illuminating force. In each of her works, space was energised through different directional and rotational pulls, often pushing the line or the shape to exit in outer space at an extension.

It would be appropriate to call each of her paintings as an opening - a door - literally open and the light rushes out and then pours in. It appears as though the artist is measuring the light through an instrument and seeking the complete form of an elusive arabesque even as she articulates the presence of the disarray of line and plane. The subtle organisation of light is evident through various formations - thread fragments, the rind of fruit, paper strips, grass, columns, slats in the body of the squared panel and, above all, the square gateway.

Ghurayya loves mirages - the presence of shadow in light. To her the dense and the opaque are less exciting. Openness and transparency are her needs, and instead of weighing down her forms with a body, she liberates them in the manner of "light breath". The active shapes of a non-representational nature traverse space that is turned into a fluid and floating surface. The shapes, like limbs, extend to reach out and grasp the unseen and the unknown. The physical presence of the human is denied but something of the surrounding atmosphere lingers. The spirit of movement is rendered almost flawlessly through a method of "drift and shift", making pictorial space a situational context to perform a rhythmic dance. Life moves and recreates itself because it practises the eternal law of entrance and exit.

She is perhaps the only artist after Nasreen Mohamedi who has refined so extremely a way of looking into an imaginative space, training the eye to penetrate it and activate it into structures with keen, musical proportions. Every drawing is like a chord being struck. It takes you to a beginning, it gives you a framework, a guideline, a theme upon which the perception could multiply and expand. The silence is unbearable if you cannot hear - but there is one resonance upon another, if you can.

Seema Ghurayya has exhibited her creations almost all over India and has also taken part in the 16th International Independent Exhibition, Kangawa, Japan and the Cairo Biennial of Art, Egypt. She has to her credit the All India Kalidas Award, Ujjain, and awards from the AIFACS, New Delhi, the National Lalit Kala Akademy and the Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. Her works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi and the CMC, New Delhi and London.

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