Ganesh Doddamani: 2014

Who it happen?

Rain is one of the most beautiful gifts bestowed on us by nature. Almost everyone love the rainy season, especially the first rain of the summer season. The sight of raindrops falling after a long summer is truly beautiful, and the only thing more beautiful is the ‘smell’ of that rain when it first hits the ground. Yes, the smell that makes us poetic and romantic seems to come from rain striking fresh soil. Many are familiar with this smell, but why does that particular rain smell so wonderful? Water itself does not have any smell, so what’s the secret behind this beautiful smell? This made me to think and work on it . From past 4 years i am working on it. I've been painting from 19 years so I certainly understand color and the application of oil paint better, but I hope I haven't evolved too much beyond that.

My vibrantly colored canvases are abstract, and any relationship to landscape has to be sought out by looking deeply. I want to have a narrow, limited footprint to tell people, This is how I see the world, and I'm going to make you see it that way for a while.” Allude to Landscape in formalistic ways, while filling the canvas with wild colors in combinations never seen in nature, The composition is usually in horizontal bands loosely suggesting earth and sky. The high horizon keeps everything earth and below.” Reaching tendril like through these broad zones of color are what I calls “vertical signifiers” - not trees, but maybe the sense of rhythm. That's how i like to paint, with darks and light, bands that create a sense of rhythm. You feel that you’re in apace that is familiar and also unfamiliar. For all their abstract freedom, these paintings are closely bound to a sense of place, a material reality that is very familiar to the artist. I have been living and working in Bangalore from past 11 years, but my impulse to paint grew naturally out of my childhood. I was painting before I even know what a painting was. In my landscape concept, the very materials the painting is made of tie it back to the land, since paint is essentially made from earth, from minerals.

The physicality of his chosen medium, oil on canvas, is very important to me. The delights in pointing out that ‘a painting is liquefied fat mixed with ground - up rocks and smeared on a flat surface. “Not surprisingly, my studio is hard-core messy, with just about every surface encrusted in truly geologic layers of dried paints. I like a certain amount of clumsiness in the process.

”Painting suits my desire to be clumsy, to make a mess. Play is most important. In order to paint, The texture of the paint drippings in the studio is reminiscent of the dense coagulation of paint at the bottom of many of my canvases, which i says is there to create an earthy feel in the four ground. I want the bottom to relate to my feet, the middle to relate to my guts, and the top to relate to my head, like you're standing in a place with a discernible foreground, middle ground, and background.

Ganesh Doddamani

19 August 2014

Art Bangloru 2014