The many prints of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Celebrated artist, art historian, poet and teacher Gulammohammed Sheikh’s passion for printmaking is not well known.

His prints — both handmade and digital — are being exhibited for the first time in a two-part show titled Hand Prints/Mind Prints.

Curated by Sheikh’s former student, photo and visual artist Pushpamala N, the retrospective celebrating 70 years of Sheikh’s printmaking has travelled from Bengaluru to Delhi and Mumbai, and is now being exhibited at TRI Art & Culture, Calcutta, a non-profit, in association with Vadhera Art Gallery.

It is on till August 2.

Pushpamala says she was not familiar with many of the prints and found it confusing initially. The two sections overlap chronologically from 2000 onwards. The hand prints were more to do with drawing, and the mind prints or digital prints were conceptual and basically collages using found material. Where printmaking was concerned, Sheikh was an “outsider” and often painted backdrops for his digital prints.

The following is an email interview with Sheikh:

Q: Did your interest in art and literature develop from the days when you contributed to the handwritten magazine Pragati in high school?

A: Yes, my writing and painting began while at school in Surendranagar, my home town in the erstwhile Saurashtra region of Gujarat.

Q: Please tell us how printmaking was practised all over the country and the artists with whom you collaborated in those early days. Did you ever meet Haren Das?

A: We knew that printmaking was conducted in Santiniketan as two of our teachers, Sankho Chaudhuri and K.G. Subramanyan, had studied there.

During the student days, collaboration among classmates was limited. We were restricted to using one or two blocks of wood. So we developed the technique of printing two or three colours from a single block. The technique was to cut out an area covering the lightest colour first, cut more for the second colour and then finally cut for the third or the final colour.

I remember that Haren Das was invited to give a demonstration of wood engraving when I was in the first or second year. We were most impressed observing him cut fine details with fine tools. I think he used ‘Box wood ’, which had close grains to allow finer cutting and detail. The Deodar wood we used for woodcut had straight grains, which required careful cutting, but we managed it with somewhat broader forms.

Q: How did the landmark printmaking workshop organised by USIS contribute to the spread and popularity of printmaking?

A: The Smithsonian Printmaking Workshop held in 1970 at Bahawalpur House in New Delhi brought about 100 artists together from all over the country. I think printmaking was limited to etching, which was not available in art schools till then.

Paul Lingren, the American printmaker, guided us all in the technique of aquatint and etching. With the best papers, inks and zinc plates available at no cost, many artists experimented with the medium. It had a far-reaching influence on the Indian art scene. I got so besotted with the medium that I got an etching press built for myself when I returned to Baroda.

Q: Tell us about the literary magazine Kshitij and your illustrations for it, and also about the little magazine Vrischik you started later with Bhupen Khakhar. Did you start writing your memoir in Gujarati concurrently?

A: Kshitij (July 1959- March-April 1967) was a literary journal edited by the eminent Gujarati writer Suresh Joshi. I worked as an ex officio art editor. In order to introduce art to all subscribers, I devised a plan that also helped cut down costs for the self-financed journal running on a shoestring budget.

I decided to ask my friends and teachers to cut a linoleum piece the size of the magazine cover, then mount it on a wooden block of a standard gauge used in metal blocks to run it on the letterpress.
So, you produced original lino-cut prints made by celebrated artists like Subramanyan, Bhupen Khakhar, Jyoti Bhatt etc for all the subscribers of Kshitij. Literally, 500 copies. I also edited a large Visual Arts number for Kshitij in 1963.

The same experiment was carried out in another self-financed venture, Vrishchik (1969-73), edited by Bhupen Khakhar and I, with the addition of a loose print in every number. Unlike Kshitij, it was meant to be a journal of communication among artists, as there was no such channel. The Lalit Kala Contemporary came out sporadically.

I began writing my memoir Gher Jataan (Returning Home) around late 1966 when I returned after a three-year sojourn in London.

Q: How did your sojourn at Royal College of Art, London, in 1966 impact your work?

A: Royal College of Art was an important chapter in my career. It enabled me to experiment with different modes of painting. I managed to build an image through collage, probably imbibed from the work of one of my tutors, Peter Blake, who was a well-known pop artist known for his collages.

London had great museums, and I learnt a great deal observing great works of art. The painting department of the Royal College, next door to the Victoria and Albert Museum, provided opportunities to see amazing Indian paintings on display and later in its reserve collection. London also made it possible for me to travel in Europe during vacations. I enjoyed travelling to Italy and discovered the works of great Sienese painters Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Sassetta and Simone Martini, favourites of a lifetime.

Q: From your prints on display in Calcutta, there seems to have been a marked change in your later work. Your earlier work, with broad strokes, had a painterly quality that was close to abstraction. The works that show horses and carriages. But in your later compositions, the emphasis is on linearity. Please explain the transition.

A: The earlier prints, of the student days in particular, were charged with the spirit of the modern. In the later prints, I developed an idiom of my own. The linearity was a common device used by many artists.

Q: What was the impact of Hamzanama on your work?

I first saw the paintings of Hamzanama in the V & A Museum, and they had a profound impact on my practice as an artist. It helped me evolve an idiom using the idea of multiplicity. I use a quote from a Hamzanama painting in an etching called ‘Riot’ (1971).

Q: Please tell us about the Chhap Foundation workshop and your collaboration with contemporary artists. Also, your work with Somnath Hore and Vivan Sundaram.

A: Vivan Sundaram had a mission to take art to the wider public. He organised a Graphic Workshop in 1973 in Baroda, inviting about 23 artists from all over India and produced a large portfolio of prints. He conceived the idea of making an edition of 50 to make the portfolio affordable. Travelling to various cities, he organised a series of exhibitions of prints and aroused a great deal of interest in the art of printmaking.

Chhaap is a small collective founded in Baroda to increase awareness of printmaking among larger audiences and dispel the notion of a hand-print being confused with reproduction. Kavita Shah, the moving spirit behind the enterprise, has organised dozens of printmaking workshops and exhibitions in India and abroad in 28 years.

I came to know Somnath Hore in 1962, when he and I had won national awards, me for painting and he for a print titled ‘Birth of a Rose’. I continued to keep in touch with him over the years and followed his practice. His set of blind prints called ‘Wounds’ I found deeply moving.

Q: In what ways is the practice of drawing different from printmaking?

A: Print essentially differs from drawing because it is a mirror image. The image made from cutting wood or etched through acid also bears greater tactility.

Q: How were you introduced to digital printmaking? How is it different?

A: I was introduced to digital printmaking in 2000, when Amit and Nandini Gandhi, who ran a digital art gallery called artUnderground in Baroda, organised a workshop for artists to learn the art of computer prints.

I got hooked and continue to make digital prints.

It is a slippery and seductive medium which begins to take over your mind. Many fall prey to the charm of the innumerable options it offers and lose their way of thinking.

Q: You are a painter, printmaker, poet, writer, art historian and pedagogue. Do all these qualities come into full play in computer printmaking?

A: No. A computer is just another device to explore the possibilities of making art.