I am fortunate that my interest has taken me to many artist studios, mostly for formal interviews, sometimes for casual conversations by way of catching up with old friends, on rare occasions to actually watch them paint, a few times simply because an artist wanted to share a difficult process or period of their practice, a few fortunate times to select works for inclusion in an exhibition, and also, although infrequently, to help a close friend or family member acquire a work directly from the artist.
Nearing his 101st birthday, Krishen Khanna is a living legend and a skilful raconteur. His Gurugram studio has been witness to the making of some of India’s most significant modernist works. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
That a studio is an intensely personal space is a given, but artists tend to impose their own relationships and rituals upon them. S.H. Raza had his idols and Gandhi hymns; some touch the floor or an easel in invocation; others light an oil lamp or an incense stick upon entering the space. Music is essential to a few, a distraction to others. Some are guided by discipline, for others discipline is wholly unnecessary in their quest for spontaneity. Some like it minimal, others fill up their studios with all the flotsam of their lives.
Anjolie Ela Menon waits for the muse to visit her at her studio in Nizamuddin Basti, New Delhi. Guarding it zealously, she says, “It is my refuge; I rejoice in it each day.” | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings are a rediscovery of Mumbai. He holds the city to account in his studio. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
Artists might work seated on the floor, stretched across a table, suspended from a forklift; strictly by day or all through the night; accept calls or silence their mobiles; have inventories of images at hand for reference or search for them within the repositories of their minds; read books, draw, sketch, or dance; cook, or not; eat, or not; sit silently or talk excitedly; laugh, cry, or laugh and cry; internalise anger or externalise it; create storms, face storms, tame storms, paint storms; turn studios into homes or homes into studios; reflect, contemplate, create.
What is it then—the studio? A place of refuge for the artist away from the world or the world itself?
Litterateur Ajeet Caur built the New Delhi studio for her daughter Arpana Caur. It was a gift of love as well as a homage to her work. “It is my zone of silence and contemplation,” says the artist. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
A wall divides Arpita Singh’s studio from that of her husband Paramjit Singh while shelves of books separate it from the living room. “When I work, I feel free,” Singh says. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
It is a space of experimentation and wonder, of the dress rehearsal before the performance. Here art is slowly, excitingly—fearlessly, fearfully—brought to life; given shape and provided form; stripped of pretence, layered by reality, contoured by fantasy, with the subtle replacing the obvious. It is a place of negotiation for the imagination and creativity; a space for urgency and slowing down, of frenzy and quietude; of mirrors and reflections but also of shattered fragments that multiply to hold multiple or no images; a measure of the mind’s ability to soar or crash. A studio is both a place of infinite freedom and a lifelong prison, both paradise and hell.
Famously peripatetic, Bose Krishnamachari is everywhere, seemingly at the same time. He can get his inspiration anywhere though he returns often to the chaos of his Mumbai studio: “The traditional notion of a studio is an old idea. For me, work itself is my studio.” | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
In my long journey of relationships with artists, studios have always been places of fascination laced with adventure. What does a writer—also a creature emerging from his study—see when he visits a studio? The artist or the art? The struggle or the result?
Ram Kumar’s studio is a guarded place that firmly keeps visitors away. Located on the east bank of the Yamuna in Delhi, it has seen Ram Kumar creating his stunning abstracts of Benaras. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
Atul Dodiya’s Mumbai studio is a welcoming space where he gauges the reactions of visitors to his works. It is also the birthplace of his ideas: “It means everything to me; it is my survival,” he says. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
The book Portrait of An Artist (with photographs by Rohit Chawla and text by me, published by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Mapin) brings yet another transgressor into the space of the studio: the photographer with his camera. Between them, the eye and the lens hope to bare the soul that most artists seem to be at pains to hide. Chawla’s photographs of 62 contemporary artists neither flatter nor deceive. They capture a fleeting moment of truth, which coexists with several truths and with as many fictions.
You have to coax Jayashree Chakravarty to part from her works at her Kolkata studio. She famously keeps revisiting them to add elements and improvise. “My work is never complete,” she says. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
This is what I have gathered about studios from the interviews I have had with artists. For most, the studio is a sacred space—not in the ritualistic sense, though that too—that they hope to keep private at most times. It is a place of escape from the everydayness of domesticity, both a sanctuary and a workplace with its own regulations that can be rigid or freeing, depending upon the artist.
Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Vadodara studio is a sanctuary where he addresses the three passions of his life: books, music, and art. “You discover yourself again and again in your studio,” he says. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
What about artist couples? Are they comfortable sharing space with each other in a studio? Yes and no. I was interested in understanding their dynamics, similarities as well as divergences. They might critique or appreciate each other, compete or be indifferent, but you can be sure that that no couple will have the same rhythm while working in the same space. And more strength to that.
Happiest when he is getting his hands and clothes dirty in his Visakhapatnam studio, G. Ravinder Reddy loves to stay inside. “My home is my studio, and my studio is my home,” he says. | Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla
Speaking to artists about their practices and studios has been an enjoyable exercise. For a while, as they shared their deepest fears and their loftiest aspirations, their joys and sorrows and liabilities, I was head priest and witch doctor, psychologist and confidant, friend and foe. I have travelled the length and breadth of India visiting studios: each one is distinctive, evoking the essence of the artist who inhabits it.
Rohit Chawla is a celebrated photographer whose lens has captured contemporary India. He has earned global acclaim, including the prestigious Cannes Lions, for his work. Kishore Singh is an author, curator, editor, and independent arts consultant.