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A
Day in the Life of an Artist :Profile
of Sadanand Benegal (By
Ramani Ramakrishnan)
One always wonders at the creative
process of an artist! Myriad questions of disbelief
keep cropping in the minds of lay-audiences when they witness
the finished piece of, say a painting or a sculpture. The
wonderment does not cease when something new is created from
the least expected of materials. For instance, when the word
sculpture is mentioned, one always thinks of bronze (or any
metal) or stone or clay. Never the word polyurethane foam
comes to our collective thoughts, particularly in the context
of classical Indian sculpting. I am talking here of the artistry
of Toronto's Sadanand Benegal. His sculptures are a familiar
and welcome sight during some of the local (Toronto) dancers'
performances, particularly those of the Chitralekha Dance
Academy.
Sadanand Benegal with one of his sculptures - THE ELEPHANTS
OF MAHABALIPURAM *
Recently,
we visited him in his studio, witnessed his process and learnt
a lot about making sculptures with foam, a fragile and brittle
material.
It was
a cold, but sunny December morning when Benegal kindly drove
us to his studio space in Stouffville, Ontario. The studio
is situated in the mezzanine annex of a major scale model-making
firm specializing in topographical scale models. The company,
Topographics Limited, where Sadanand spent most of his Canadian
working life, makes scale models of major topographical, three
dimensional representations. One of their prized projects
was the reproduction of Tutenkamun's sarcophagus replica in
foam, for a major Toronto exhibition in the late 70s. The
company had started using foam material for their replicas
and models and Benegal honed in his skills as part of his
work. He became adept in using not only the large three dimensional
cutting machine, but also simple chisels, knifes for cutting
and shaping foam materials. One must remember that the material
is brittle, fragile and incredibly delicate to work with.
To digress, now I realize how anxious Sadanand gets when novices,
including yours truly, handle his creations.
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DANCING GANESHA * (full)
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DANCING GANESHA (close up)
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DURGA THE SLAYER OF MAHISHA * |
We were
first led on a general tour of the facilities - the building
was undergoing renovations after the recent move. One soon
realizes that Benegal's tools are very spartan and the dominant
tools are his imagination and his deft fingers. One is rather
amazed that with such minimal resources, he is able to produce
rather striking sculptures.
We requested
Benegal to explain the process of producing sculptures from
such user-unfriendly materials. We call these foams unfriendly
for one can imagine the amount of wastage created by a beginner.
Imagine the frustrations! We decided to use his last creation
for Chitralekha Dance Academy for their 'Shringar' production
to understand the process. Benegal was working on completing
a base for the piece and hence the sculpture was still stored
in the studio.
Benegal
began his explanations by pointing out that his creations
have usually two starting points. Either his creations are
purely from his imagination, which he immediately sketches
out, or they are building blocks of some Indian paintings
or sculptures. For instance, his 'Shringar' used a photograph
of an existing sculpture on the walls of the renowned 11th
century Rajrani Temple in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, as inspiration.
The finished piece was very much redolent of Rodin's famous
Kiss sculpture. Sadanand immediately points out that the photograph
at hand is only two-dimensional. His first task was to create
an enlargement of the two-dimensional painting and use his
imagination to give it depth and also sketch out the rear-side
of the sculpture. Of course, the rear-side can always be modified
as the artist starts to immerse himself into this creation.
Then the real task begins. The colour and shade of the foam
piece are selected and the foam sheet of the requisite thickness
is chosen. One must always remember that foam creations are
monolithic and cannot be undertaken as modules which can be
joined (in some fashion) at a later time. What this means
is that if one makes a major faux pas near the end of the
creation, the piece has to be discarded and nothing can be
salvaged. Perhaps, this is true of all artistic creations.
Patchwork mending doesn't behoove of a creative endeavour.
Then the chiseling, cutting (not much actually) and shaping
begin
Sadanand
was full of excitement when he actually showed me how to polish
and shape a piece of foam. However, it is indeed a painstaking
labour intensive undertaking. One can only summarize the time
spent as 'pure labour of love.' Sadanand spent approximately
300 hours on the 'Shringar' from start to finish. Most of
his tools are small and require methodical attention to detail.
Benegal has devised tools befitting the medium, polyurethane
foam in this instance. 'The foam, which appears as granite,
yet crumbles as sand,' says Sadanand. Small hand saws and
a artist's palette knife serve as chisels to hew away larger
volumes of material in carving, while specially shaped files,
fashioned from a denser foam, are used for carving, smoothing
and coaxing in the finer details, creases, swells and expressions
out of compliant artistic raw materials (polyurethane foam).
Of course he has honed his tools over the past 30 years or
so. His actual sculpting began only about 10 years ago. His
oeuvre spans from small to quite large pieces; from relief
to full fledged three-dimensional sculptures.
In addition
to creating stand-alone pieces, Benegal has also mastered
mould making, whereby he could create many copies of his favourite
creations, for fragility of his polyurethane foam sculptures
have been his constant fret. In an effort to guarantee durability
to his creations, he has adopted a process of making moulds,
shown above, of some of his creations, such as bas-relief
modules, mosaic tiles and architectural motifs. This entails
making painted latex rubber or poured silicon rubber moulds
bolstered by plaster or fibreglass-reinforced polyester resin
"mother moulds." Final copies of the original sculpture
made from pouring of a casting material of choice varying
from urethane resin, polyester casting resin to the traditional
casting plaster. All of the castings are paintable, though
some properties differ, yet they are all commonly more durable
to touch than the original foam carving and faithful in appearance
to it. Benegal's "The wheel of Lord Surya's Chariot"
and "The Horse of Lord Surya's Chariot," bas-relief
mosaic tile composite sculpture, is the most important example
of the process described. It was exhibited at the Odissi dance
performance by the Chitralekha Dance Academy of the classic
"Konarak Lasya Leela" in September 1996 at Toronto's
MacMillan Theatre.
Sadanand
Benegal has retired from Topographics Limited. However, one
cannot stop him from visiting the premises and imbuing the
smell of foam so that the aroma could entice him to plan his
next project. He keeps a regular schedule of visiting the
studio everyday (from 9.30 a.m. till about noon) and puttering
about. Where does he go from here? He is working on assembling
his creations for a possible showing in a major Canadian museum
space. He hopes the arrangements could all fall in place such
that an exhibition could be mounted sometime this year. We
dearly and eagerly look forward to that assignation!
Source:
South
Asian Outlook
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