My paintings are realistic, but not real: Kathryn Myers

Dec 24, 2016

Kathryn Myers, a painter and professor of art at the University of Connecticut, has exhibited her paintings widely in the United States and India. An exhibition of photographs by Myers, and Dinesh Khanna — titled “Reciprocation” — is currently on at the Art and Aesthetic gallery in New Delhi. The show, which brings together the two photographers for the first time, showcasing their works “in response to each other’s creative interests,” is on till January 11, 2017.

Excerpts from an interview with The Punch.

THE PUNCH: Tell us something about your works that are part of the show, “Reciprocation”. How do they respond to the insider-outsider discourse?

KATHRYN MYERS: The title was based on my sense of connection with Dinesh Khanna, who first encouraged me to consider my photographs as a legitimate part of my creative process, for which I started creating a few series of works. Then we decided to pair bodies of work that had a connection with colour or with the city of Varansi where I first met and interviewed him for my video series. I don’t feel much like an outsider anymore as I’ve been coming to India regularly since 1999, in the last few years, twice a year. But I guess in the sense that often someone from outside notices things that those seeing the same thing all of the time might not notice. In general, I’m attracted to the same kind of thing wherever I go. I love vernacular architecture and worn and abraded surfaces, but one day in Varanasi, I noticed the frequency of the combination of pink and green, (complimentary colours, thus the title of the series) and started that series. Maybe also because I know that every tourist or visitor to Varanasi photographs the ghats (I have hundreds myself and a video) that the small back alleyways interested me more as photographs than scenes of the ghats. It’s like the door to Alice in Wonderland back in those lanes and the sense of constriction is such contrast to the openness of the ghats. As an outsider, I’m also sensitive about exoticising others, so I tend to stay away from figurative imagery these days. But also, and this figures more into my paintings than the photos, if a figure is in a space, the narrative becomes about that relationship, if the space is depicted itself, then it becomes the viewer’s space. Because I’ve been coming to and feeling deeply connected to India for so long, I no longer felt I wanted to depict people in their spaces, but to own sense of myself inhabiting these spaces.

THE PUNCH: As a photographer and as an artist, how do you engage with “objective reality”? How important is this engagement for your art?

KATHRYN MYERS: My early work was more invented narrative, so I was always projecting myself into it, making interpretations based on making the unfamiliar familiar, but now I feel a more formalist response which is I guess more objective. The photographs are certainly more objective because they are presented as found and selected, where my paintings start with objective information but go through a series of technical and conceptual translations.

THE PUNCH: In your series of photographs, opposites — darkness and light, the mundane and the profound — and colours and forms are often seen to be juxtaposed. How do you approach a frame? How important is form to you?

KATHRYN MYERS: Form and light is where it starts for me, structure and composition, but of course something has to grab me to inspire me to frame a particular scene, and there is often a magic to that, it might be very unexpected. I primarily go out to shoot reference images for my paintings, that’s my first instinct which is not about composing at all but about information. I put all sorts of bits and pieces together to make my paintings but there might be a master reference, always architectural. I have several different series of photos on my website. The Canal was about the sense of formal beauty in trash or reflections in a dirty canal, so that might be about opposites, but it was at first a formal response to shape, form, light, though never totally abstract.

THE PUNCH: In Varanasi Passage, you chronicle spaces as passages of time, movement and transformation etc. Do you consciously set out to capture the underlying geometry of an image?

KATHRYN MYERS: I saw those spaces as small jewel boxes and although the amount of rich information would have made wonderful large photos, I saw them more as the intimacy of a miniature painting or a Joseph Cornell box. How those spaces compose themselves is about how the space itself is constructed so efficiently for a small space, and of course, the use of colour to attract customers probably. But I see it often in passing so many small shops along the road, carpentry or welding shops, these tiny containers of such rich information. I can’t wait to get to Parry’s Corner in Chennai where I’ll be going soon. I’ve made a lot of similar imagery there, but not with the same sense of “photographic consciousness” that I would make them with now. But I tended not to think of the photos as a serious part of my creative practice until Dinesh’s encouragement, which is why the show is titled “Reciprocation”.

THE PUNCH: Tell us about your interest in Indian contemporary art. How did “Regarding India”, your series of conversations with Indian artists, happen?

KATHRYN MYERS: I first became aware of the contemporary art scene because I heard of Peter Nagy, who is incidentally from Connecticut, but lived in India for decades and started Nature Morte gallery which is still going strong. I visited him in 1999 on my first trip to India when I had a residency at Sanskriti Kendra. In those early days, it was not easy to find the galleries. But when I returned to the US, Bose Pacia was open in New York and so I think I learned a lot about contemporary art through some of the new Indian art galleries in New York and there was a community of artists, Indian and western, that were excited about Indian art and went to the openings. Then I started teaching a class on Indian art after curating a large show at our university museum. After teaching the class for a few years, I thought what was missing was the artists speaking themselves, being an artist, I know artists talk about their work differently than historians or critics, and that turned out to be true. My students love the videos. I could also ask direct questions in the videos that I thought my students, who have little if any knowledge about India, would find helpful. I interviewed over 60 artists, but the video editing process is much more tedious than I realised, so I’ve only edited about 20 so far.

Complimentary, Jharkhand, 2013

THE PUNCH: What fascinates you most about India each time you visit the country? Have the terms and shape of your engagement and understanding of India and its diversity changed over the years?

KATHRYN MYERS: There is always a “vibe” to a place that is impossible to really describe, and I feel it in India the moment I get off the plane, and I long for it when I’m not here but I know living here all the time would spoil that. I almost feel that if I come too often that will be gone someday to familiarity. But that doesn’t mean I’ll want to deprive myself of coming often, so much changes so quickly that it’s better to get used to it gradually than have to make major adjustments. And each part of India has a different vibe, that was maybe more apparent to me during my first visit to India when I moved from Ahmedabad to Mumbai to Goa to Kochin, then all over Rajasthan and finally to Varanasi in very quick sequence. Though there were similarities, each place was so different and felt so different.

I used to travel a lot more and so I miss that sense of adventure, I love night trains, but no longer seem to have time for that kind of slow travel. But it’s been replaced with a feeling of being “home” through friends I visit in different parts of India — Baroda, Ahmedabad, Varanasi, Goa. I’ve had a lot of amazing trips north and south, often travelling with friends that makes it a bit easier, particularly when hiring cars for a long temple trip south, or to Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh or Sikkim. With each friend I travel with, I experience India differently, say if they are more interested in adventure, seeing mountains, are into Indian spirituality or contemporary art. A few years ago, I had a great road trip with my friend Pradosh from Varanasi to Bhubaneswar and onto Puri, I’d love to do that again. (Maybe he will even let me drive the next time!) This summer, I think I’ll be travelling with a friend to Assam with a friend from the US as she is interested in researching tea plantations. But in the past few years, I’ve liked hanging out in Delhi, just being around to visit friends and go to events more casually, to visit studios. I’ve been sharing a barsati with my friend Maya Kovaksya, who lives in Beijing, and that’s been a very different way of being here. (As it turns out, it’s not easy to maintain a place when you are not here very often so we will be giving that up,) but I have a lot of friends in Delhi and with Airb&b there are countless interesting places to stay and each time you discover a new neighborhood, I love just roaming around. I’ve loved being in Jangpura, I don’t feel like a tourist here like I did when I used to stay in Paharganj.

I’ve appreciated seeing the immense changes in the years I’ve been here but there is a lot I miss also. I can’t imagine Delhi now without the metro, but during my first trip I used to take the bus every day from Sanskriti Kendra to Connaught place just to go to an internet café, I can’t imagine doing that now!

Varanasi Passage, 2013

THE PUNCH: How do you respond to the urban landscapes and settings across cultures?

KATHRYN MYERS: The urban landscape in India does not feel as sterile as in other places; there is still a lot of grit to it and all sorts of things happening on ground level, the informal alongside the formal. Sometimes this can be inconvenient and annoying, but it provides a great sense of texture and relief from the banalness of concrete. I tend to response more to old architecture, the bungalows of Delhi, but I’ve come to love the nearly abstract and often awkward shapes of the concrete boxes often with jutting balconies, when newly painted they reflect the light so beautifully. Nobody does Art Deco architecture better than India, or curved buildings. I love those that seem to have a light purple or bluish wash. I have favorite buildings in different cities that I always revisit. I think the architecture in Mumbai blows me away the most and also old Tamil houses such as you can still fine in villages in South India, but hardly much anymore. I am an amateur architectural historian!

THE PUNCH: What are the correlations between a painting and a photograph? How do these correlations play out in your works? What space do videos occupy?

KATHRYN MYERS: I have not really found a place in my creative work for video, I thought that might happen but it has not. Aside from the interviews, I made a few short videos in my “Devotion”, series but those were for my Indian art class as a way of showing the sensation of being at a mosque, temple or the one I made about women making kolams. I do enjoy the creativity of editing the interview videos, but keep them very simple to foreground that the video is about the artist and not myself. In the first few, you see more “techniques” because I was learning and experimenting, but not so much anymore.

I have a very different instinct about my photos and paintings. One of the reasons photography satisfies me less is that for me it’s too fast a process. In the paintings, I’m slowly recreating the surfaces, using methods of layering transparent and opaque paint, erasure and abrasive techniques that often mimics the accretion of detail on the buildings. I often bring together details from many different structures to create something new as the paintings suggest or lead me during the long process of making them where I develop a relationship with the piece. So they are very “fictive”, including any sense of suggestive narrative, though the absence of people in a country that is so full of people is often what people find unusual about them, they are so quiet. The photos tend to be simpler in structure or like the Canal series, things I would not be interested in translating in to painting, as painting is always a translation, where the photos are as they were found, just selected, no photoshopping. I think my photographs compliment my paintings in that they allow for a broader response to India and often the viewer is more interested in “the real thing” than a translation through the painting process, or vice-versa. The last thing I would want is to feel that the bodies of work compete with each other, if that happened, I would not show them in the same space.

THE PUNCH: You are also a professor of art at University of Connecticut. What are your core approaches to teaching art? How do you interpret art for your students?

KATHRYN MYERS: I’ve been teaching undergraduate and graduate students for 32 years. I believe in a solid foundation of skills, including structure, form and a sensitivity to the particular techniques being used. I primarily teach aquamedia (opaque and transparent watercolour) and drawing, but sometimes foundation studio and advanced senior seminars. Once some basic skills are developed, I give what I hope are stimulating thought-provoking projects and for this I often tap into my connections with Indian art. My foundation students learned and made kolams outside the art building in flour. I connected this ancient tradition to non-objective, symmetrical, ephemeral performative art in a contemporary context. I have a great collection of indigenous art — Warli, Madhubani, Bengali scrolls. I bring this work in and create projects responding to the structure or techniques. We might do something based on the structure of the mandala, or the space and techniques of a miniature painting. When showing examples of artists’ work to students which I do whenever I introduce a new project, I always include so much Indian art — Sujith SN, or Manunath, or Indrapramit Roy, Nilima Sheikh, Manisha Parekh, are favorites to show in aquamedia, for instance. Because of my Indian art class, I have vast digital files on contemporary Indian art, most of which I made myself by photographing from books and catalogues. The students have otherwise not heard of these artists, it’s a revelation for them and as global citizens, they should know about these artists. I also have been able to bring Indian artist as guest speakers if they are in the US, as UConn is between New York and Boston. We have had a nice series — Mithu Sen, V. Ramesh, Kanchan Chander — and this fall, Vibha Galhotra and Seema Kohli will come. We are hoping Ravi Agarwal can come this spring as he is in the US for a conference. I’ve also hosted an Indian Fulbrighter, Pradosh Mishra from BHU and as a visiting guest professor, Neeta Omprakash, an art historian from Goa, who later came back on a Fulbright.

Varanasi Passage, 2013

THE PUNCH: How would you define your paintings or photographs? Are they, in some way, reflective of reality? Do you wish them to be perceived in a certain way?

KATHRYN MYERS: In the US what I do would just be termed representational painting, which has such a long tradition in western art, but is not so common in Indian painting aside from a few artists like Sudhir Patwardhan whose work I admire greatly. When I worked in oil, the paintings looked more realistic, mimicking real spaces. I can’t help myself from painting very realistically. It’s so imbedded in me that I’ve never been able to work more loosely and I’m very attracted to objective reality. I get excited about describing what I see and inventing from that. I love trying to replicate in paint, a particular surface or form I see. Gouache is flatter so it gives me more freedom to play with flat and deep space and surface. I used to work at a very large scale, but after returning from India the first time, I started working much smaller. It might have been a natural transition, also that there was so much I wanted to describe that I wanted to make paintings more quickly than a large piece would allow for, and maybe also the strong influence of the miniature. My paintings are realistic, but not real because you would never find one of them. Often in the old city in Ahmedabad, where a lot of my source images come from, I would think I found one of my paintings, but it was never possible because they come from an amalgamation of bits and pieces. There are only a few that are pretty much what was there in front of me.

I don’t feel connected to the overarching dialogue of photography as art in the way I have been as a painter. So, as a photographer, I feel a bit out of the loop. There are so many terms designating different types of styles of photography that I’m not aware of. I respect an artist’s full engagement with the field of art they are in and the sense of dialogue with other artists in that field.

THE PUNCH: Could you tell us some of your influences in art and photography? Who are your favourite Indian artists/photographers?

KATHRYN MYERS: My influences have changed naturally so much over the years and often the work I admire often has nothing to do with my own work or I don’t see any direct influences. Edward Hopper has probably been the influence that has made the transition from my early large religious Baroque inspired figurative paintings to my much quieter small mysterious architectural paintings. I find myself poring over books of miniature painting. I can never get enough of them — the design, colour, details and shifting from real to fictive space, use of borders, and the sumptuous surfaces always inspire me, and probably more indirectly in my work. I’ve even commissioned some Pahari miniatures from contemporary masters like Vijay Sharma from Chamba. Also ancient diagrammatic art, minimal Tantra images or Subtle Body, works I saw at the Delhi Handicrafts museum and the National museum on my first visit that caused me to want to keep coming back to India that had a profound impression on me.

There are so many people who take ravishing photos of India, but I think Stephen Huyler and his wonderful Rizzoli books, such as Painted Prayers, Women’s Art in Village India were an early revelation. Another photographer I met very early was Raghubir Singh, who died just about a month after I met him in Delhi in 1999. You’ll see some of my favourite Indian artists in the videos — Ravi Agarwal, who is such a thoughtful philosopher as well as a photographer, and, of course, Dinesh Khanna for the versatility of his work and particular series that knock me about as his chair series, and Urban Trivia and Double Take. I love the work of Dayanita Singh. I seem to get lucky that so often there is a show of her work up when I come to Delhi. As for painters, Arpita Singh, Manisha Parekh, and they could not be more different. Also, Madhvi Parekh for her integration of a folk aesthetic. G M and Nilima Sheikh are heroes (I interviewed GM, but the sound quality of my microphone was terrible so I never edited it). He is such a great writer and storyteller. K G Subramanyan, particularly his works on paper and the gorgeous book published on that body of work which I treated myself to. Sheba Chachhi’s elaborate installations and animated books with her deep knowledge of Indian aesthetics and mythology and its connections to current environmental crises. Sujith SN for his haunting watercolours (I am the happy owner of two small pieces from his Ballad of the Black River series) Charmi Gada Shah’s small reconstructions of old Bombay houses. I could go on and on….

THE PUNCH: What are you currently working on?

KATHRYN MYERS: I’ve been collaborating with John Bowles and Aurogeeta Das, who are both writers and specialists on indigenous art. John lives in California and Aurogeeta in London, but she is originally from Pondicherry. We went to Madhubani in the fall of 2015 to interview a Dalit artist and her extended family and are still working on that video for which Aurogeeta has interviewed the artist Urmila Devi, and transcribed it. It’s the first video I’ve made that is collaborative and transcribed with sub-titles. I’m doing the editing, collaborating for something that I know will be used is a nice process. John, who has written about and curated shows on Gond art in the past, hopes to curate a show of Dalit artists from Mithila who have received less attention than Mithila artists from the upper castes. We hope to do more interviews in Mithila maybe next March. We were hosted by the Mithila school of art that is run by David Szanton from Berkley and Parmeshwar Jha, who moves back and forth between his house in Madhubani and New Jersey. It’s a fantastic organisation and free school of art that is struggling to find funding to keep going. I feel grateful to have met and worked with them. It brought me back to my first love of Indian art, which I saw at the crafts museum in Delhi. Then I have a lot of catch-up to do, older interviews to still edit — the photographer Ram Rahman was one of the more recent and now that’s two years ago. So, I’m way behind. In the winter, when my time is more broken up by teaching, I find I can edit videos, but in the summer when I can work continuously, that’s better for painting. I’ll keep the “Regarding India” series going, but have slowed down my interviewing, which I’m doing now with Sapna Bhatia from Bring Home Stories. They send a film crew out with me and they make wonderful short videos and I have all of the footage to make longer videos if I want.

I always have materials for new paintings lined up and I have an ongoing photographic series on antique architecture in New England titled “Revival, Survival and Ruin.”

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My paintings are realistic, but not real: Kathryn Myers

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