GRBarnett: INDIA: UDAIPUR

Thursday, March 13, 2025

INDIA: UDAIPUR - PACIFIC ART

Naresh is a complex story... he & his brother Jeetu are artists, trained by their father [& 3 previous generations] in a very traditional style of Indian painting. We have bought & commissioned several paintings from them during interim years since a "chance" (or was it fated?) so, yes, I suppose a fated meeting... knowing ever better how Mother India works in such various ways. Stephen was out on an errand outside the gate of Amet Haveli, where we have stayed on both of our visits to Udaipur, when he encountered Naresh, looking to bring customers to a studio & gallery which he & his brother have nearby... PACIFIC ART. A connection was made.

They have kept in touch during the difficult times the tourist business in India has suffered during pandemic's curtailment of travel & we have been helping them with whatever business we can offer... when it seems useful, logical & honest. What Stephen celebrates as "shoe-leather philanthropy" can become complicated when working & dancing between different social & economic realities! That is complexity indeed.

Above we pose together at the entrance to their store... This space is used as adjunct studio space, but the weather is often clement enough to encourage them to paint on the portable panels on which they paint... inviting the curiosity of passersby.

They also offer classes for visitors wanting to share in study of their heritage... it can become a lively time! Being an artist who has long lived intimately with my own studios for decades, I appreciate & celebrate the joys & vicissitudes(!) of such a lifestyle.

Being more removed, I have mostly chosen to keep a cautious distance while Stephen danced closer to the edges of the situation. Jeetu's two young sons often joined the numerous phone calls I sometimes overheard. Stephen's love of youngsters & education has embraced a role of encouraging them to practice more usefully the English they are studying in school. I can only appreciate the important rarity of such two-way opportunity between several sides of a world needing such sharing conversation. Being bright & boisterous, they've become in our (and the family's) loving humor, "the Monkey Boys."

Stephen had also talked to the patriarch of this family, who he also met during those calls, learning of the illness which eventually became fatal. He chose to help the family to take the body to Varanasi for cremation on the banks of the Ganges... cherished by Hindu belief. We've had several experiences being parts of that cultural diaspora. He has long been a global citizen & I feel privileged to join as a novice!

We do love India... & we cherish being part of a diaspora which a guest at the family wedding we attended in 2005 considered us to have joined. It offers larger & richer value than our country's current political situation might suggest!

Inside this, my first meeting of yet another Indian family, I could celebrate better acceptance of the diaspora, which makes us both something of genuine importance to this family. We were invited to visit their home, also in the neighborhood, & to join them for several meals. This is the kind of experience we love as the best way to learn at more depth while we travel.

These photos share the family at dinner; the first taken by Jeetu... includes their mother, who still lives with them [more accurately they still live with her in the family's home] & the boys' mother, all having roles in ancient familial custom. The meal was served on Naresh's big bed, he, as eldest son, having become the Patriarch. The women occupied places on the floor, often peering at soap operas on a TV screen. Some aspects of culture are not always perfectly comfortable for us.

A second shot, this time by Naresh, includes Jeetu.

I had a visceral attraction to this piece by Jeetu when I first saw it while he was working on it in the sun outside the shop. While I like the color work, I was very impressed by his sure draftsmanship in the drawing of the group of people, yet to be painted with the hand-ground pigment.

I love fine pencil-work... that being a medium in which I often play. I chose to acquire a finished version, while also tried suggest to them I believed the raw simplicity of less "finished" version's style might find a market further afield like an American or European avant-garde gallery. ... Is its simplicity & openness "more abstract"? Or don't I simply love pencil?

My notion was too avant... too ahead of their immediate comprehension & understanding, although they appreciated my compliments, & ripped it rather dramatically loose from the panel & presented it to me. They are painted on thin tough silk fabric pasted down with, I suspect, rice flour. [I need to educate myself.] Both are being framed now & I'm thinking they might be hung so as to be seen between two rooms- one echoing the other.

I'll thank them daily for facilitating another story in my dancing between cultures!

This is some of our collection of their work:

These two were painted from photographs we sent. First a shot of our garden at Soundcliff, which reminds us of our life before we moved to the condo with only a few pots on a deck...

& this of us standing on a maze.

Naresh often has taken Stephen on video tours of the temples where he visits to worship.. often to the one we could see from the dining terrace of Amet Haveli. When we visited the priest allowed him to take us up to the roof to take-in the view, showing us more of the elegant architecture of the city which is the setting for many of their paintings, but the unexpected, pleasant surprise to my sensibility's eyes, was the paving on the roof terrace... random mosaic of broken pottery shards!