Post-modern miniatures

MARC BAUDIN was sailing in the Atlantic in 1982, when he heard that his sister Brigette had married a scion from Amer near Jaipur. Brigette, now Brigette Singh, is a pioneering designer working with Rajasthani craftsmen, while Marc has gone on to become a pioneer in the production of contemporary post modern miniature works from Rajasthan.

Taking off from Sangram Singh's (Brigette's father-in-law) atelier - he was patron to a number of Rajasthani miniaturists - Marc started a completely new genre. He orchestrated the production of miniature paintings which encompassed the sacred traditions of India, Tibet and Sri Lanka. The result was a body of work which had a freshness and sparkle missing in the production of present day miniatures.

A meeting with seminal scholar of Tibetan iconography and art Robert Beer resulted in the production of this vast body of 93 works which Marc is taking to Tibet House in New York.

Robert Beer is proficient in brush drawings. For his second book on the Mahasiddhas, he did all the 200 plates which illustrated the book. It takes Beer anything between 50 hours to 200 hours to finish a drawing. When Beer saw what Marc was able to achieve with miniature artists Jai Shankar Sharma and Babulal Marotia, he too become fascinated. He gave Marc a number of his drawings to be filled in with colour by the artists under the guidance of Marc.

With the drawings of Beer, Marc asked Marotia and Sharma to use the traditional miniature painting style, but what emerged was a new body of work; in fact it was post-modern. There was hybridity, cross referencing, a multi-disciplinary approach and a continuity with the past. The paintings which emerged were a result of a mixing of genres and subjects and not a reproduction of old copies.

The colour pigments used are from Rajasthan, and the technique used similar to Buddhist painting. It is in the excerpting and cropping of images from large thangakas which imparts vivacity and sparkle to the paintings.

After showcasing the works at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Delhi, Marc will be taking then to New York this autumn. Marc has done 53 paintings on the Mahasiddhas, 30 on Buddhist traditions from Sri Lanka and Tibet and 10 or 12 on Hindu inconography.

ALKA PANDE

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