Portrait of a true artist

Amarjot Kaur

On March 14, this year, US-based Indian artist Vilas Tonape visited the former US President George Bush’s residence to teach him a thing or two about portrait painting.

“He’s not like how the media portrayed him. In fact, he is quite smart and humorous,” he says, while stealing a glance at the new home secretary of Chandigarh, Arun Kumar Gupta, whose portrait he’s been painting using charcoal, at Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi’s Open Hand Art Studios in Le Corbusier Centre, Sector 19, on Saturday.

He had earlier painted a portrait of a model in oil paints. As he continues to rub the dense charcoal on paper, carefully defining Gupta’s features, Vilas addresses some 50 students from the Government College of Art, Chandigarh and other artists from the city on nuances of portrait-making.

Sporadically, he asks the students and art enthusiasts, “Does this look fine? Shall I use while colour here to give it that burnished texture?”

Brought up in South Mumbai’s Sewri area, Vilas’s tryst with art has humble beginnings. “As a child, I would frequent movie theatres with my father. Those days, we didn’t have digital flex posters of movies. Those days, movie posters were hand-painted and was I mesmerised looking at them! Each time, I’d insist on reaching theatres at least 15 minutes before the movie, just to look at the posters. When I grew up, I tried my hand at it, but it didn’t work out,” he says.

A teacher at the Art Department of Methodist University, North Carolina, US, Vilas graduated in drawing and painting from Sir JJ School of Arts in Mumbai before moving to the US in 1994 to pursue MFA in painting from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth on full scholarship.

That art is almost as complicated as artists, what more can an art school do than hone your already existing talent. Right? Wrong. Vilas narrates an incident: “This one time, I was desperately looking to make a masterpiece, in the course of which I had made some three incomplete attempts. My professor, upon observing my frustration, asked me if I were looking for a treasure trove. He said it’s good that you are looking for treasure, that you are curious, but you are digging 3-foot holes everywhere, rather, dig one big hole and dig deep. Once you go deep, you won’t care about the treasure,” he says.

“At first, I didn’t know what he said, but now I know. When you are truly absorbed in a painting, deep into it, you stop worrying about the need to impress others,” he smiles.

amarjot@tribunemail.com