Page 106 - Eye of the beholder

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PRABHA B. [1933-2001]: THE FEMININE AESTHETIC
"It is my aim to paint the trauma and tragedy of women“
B. Prabha preeminently was an artist who developed her feminine aesthetics with a distinct signature style. Her women were beautiful; dark complexioned, elegant, tall, stately and accentuated by colourful saris and accessories that often reflected their social status. Her imagery of women also marked an ode to her spirit and celebration of feminine energy, which served as a trope in signaling their hardship, struggles and angst as they ploughed through life silently but carrying the pathos in their large eyes that ultimately becomes the mirror of their soul. Speaking about her body of work, Prabha once said, "The core theme of my paintings was always women and their sufferings. I have seen them and observed them closely. I did not just think of the urban woman but also those in rural areas, who were as creative. They exude so many emotions to portray." Before arriving at her figurative idiom, Prabha worked in an abstract language. Yet these abstracts were the distillation of forms derived from nature and rustic habitation engaged through lines, colours and textures. The essentialization of forms was the result of her study and experimentation making her canvases stark and restrained with the generous application of paint in the background and subtle nuances of monochromatic shades in her forms and objects. Lines dominated her abstracts and generally engaged with one dominant hue with its tints and shades, with background covered in sweeping broad brush strokes. It had strong resonance to Post-Impressionist artists particularly Cezanne. Born in the village of Bela, near Nagpur in Maharashtra in 1933, she grew up in a close knit middle class family. She studied at the Nagpur School of Art and went on pursue a Diploma in Painting and Mural Painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. Her first show, while she was still in the art school, proved memorable as Homi J. Bhabha, an eminent Indian scientist, acquired three of her paintings. This gesture boosted her confidence and after that her artistic journey remained successfully fulfilled.
Although she worked mostly with oils on canvas, she also explored several media, styles and subjects before finally settling with oils as her preferred medium. Her art grew and developed from her intense experimentations and she ultimately settled on her expressionistic feminine imagery. Her oeuvre covered a wide gamut of subjects, from landscapes, urban and rural scapes, and village compositions with groups of young women selling their ware of earthen pots, or socially conscious groups of women engaged in playing cards. Her compositions fundamentally constituted either single figure pensive and contemplative or two forms who hardly communicate with each other. The structuring of her compositions was equally interesting, in the manner she placed her figure either frontal or in profile against interesting backgrounds of their rustic homes or uneventful backgrounds with emphasis on women either carrying a basket or holding fish in her hands. The textural quality obtained through palette knife offered visual titillation, and the lack of drama made her works placid.
A significant component of Prabha’s body of work was the artist’s self-conscious attempt to immortalize the plight of Indian women. Yet this plight hardly makes an impact as her visual language does not bear correspondence to her imagery which though accentuated was romantic and sentimental than emotional. The design element captures the imagination more than their lived reality. Settling in Bombay after her marriage to the sculptor B. Vitthal in 1956, her perceptive acumen observed, experienced and internalized the life of women of different social status. It was her sensitivity and artistic sensibility that she filtered these experiences and zeroed on to portray the less privileged particularly the rural women folks that populate her canvases largely.