Analyzing the Art Life of Dinesh P G

Dinesh P G an artist from Thrissur, Kerala, born in 1972, is a cordial and curious personality. He is a painter and a sculptor, now turned into an educationist too. He completed a 5-year national diploma in painting with distinction from Government College of Fine Arts, Thrissur, Kerala. A very sarcastic way of looking at the world is evident in his art; he mocks the institutions by assimilating the erotic tasting poems he heard when he was young. While laughing he says that people from Thrissur explore all depths of humor and mockery, this is a major influence on him and his expressions. Initially he worked and lived at Cholamandala artist village at Chennai. He asserts that his medium of expression is his art, an artist is heard independently this special privilege is well manipulated and structured to draw and splash his symphonies on canvas.

Dinesh is from a carpenter family; he was inspired by his grandparents who were from an agricultural village. Later these memories sprouted in his landscape paintings and sketches. Dinesh is visually hyper curious, always studying and sketching internally, taking life lightly finds geometry and aesthetics in objects in space. Art is happening for him, it’s not something pre-planned. Indeed, there are homework imagination and amalgamation but for him when it comes to canvas it happens. Dinesh is famous in the Indian art scene for his own style and color combination, I have observed that his paintings are structurally very perfect, and his hues are so revealing. He adopts a pop-surrealistic style in his works, his sculptures are deviant and descriptive. Regarding backgrounds for works he choose many sizes, classic strokes on big canvas are so evident. Kerala is not that accustomed to street art; Dinesh is excited to implement the same in his art conversations. Maybe Dinesh is one of the upcoming artists from Kerala having huge exposures and ideologies in art, he prefers to live in reality and be hedonistic in life. His art life is very intellectually woven in the wild imagination, he also recognizes the commercial side of art. Artists, like any other profession, need to be compensated, Dinesh has this awareness. He was fascinated by the colorful sweets and strange objects he encountered as a child in temple festivals and other interesting places, later this influenced his visual politics and color blends. Regarding sculpting he is very surrealistic, the medium is mostly terracotta and wood.

Other than this his work is very thoughtful, he always says art has changed radically, especially contemporary art, in contemporary scenario artist is like any professional person, he is a creator of aesthetics with high reasonable value and celebration. He adds that it’s a rare phenomenon to have art temperament if one acquired it, he or she must nurture it. He also practices eroticism in his works, rather than obscene its pure art from his perspectives.

Dinesh’s explanation about his work of art.

My working methodology is very intuitive. There are no preparatory drawings or sketches, but intuition governs the forms and characters that take up the space on my canvas. A conditioned quality of emotions, expressing varied messages is bought forth to my canvas filtered through many parameters that are either my surroundings that I have internalized through time or a comment on the external reality that affects me or on which I would like to use my art to present a narrative-based commentary.

I have tried to absorb various experiences from life to translate them into a process that helps me generate the context for my art. From creating cartoons and illustrations for children’s books to painting on wooden boxes, since I came from a family of carpenters, each of these experiences has added a dimension to the layered meaning of my art. Creating a world of fiction through illustration for children, I feel, translated into a satire and sarcasm that I could convey through morphed imagery of beings. Each being that I create to be a protagonist or an actor on my stage [canvas] is identifiable in parts but as a whole remains an alien to the viewer. The identification of the parts leads the viewer on a quest to know why the morphing has taken place, why the head is not on the right body. This quest is the dialogue that is my primary intent, the interaction and the questioning by the viewer. This interaction and interpretation, the to and from camaraderie between my theatre and the viewer puts life into the actors, the morphed beings of my reality.

The morphed heads, the non-human yet human bodied creatures are also used to depict the non-reality of our surroundings. The satire of the posing family, the mockery made of the mythological past. I do not give human heads but those of animals, for nobody is really true to himself. Many times, I represent the many facets of one persona through multiple non-being beings on the canvas, sometimes being introspective I represent the multiple facets of me.

The theatre is set to project personal idiosyncrasies, generalizing mythology and creating provocative settings for known idioms in religion and culture. There is a surreal quality that I try and induce into my art only to exaggerate the satire and sarcasm, the feel of the unreal and the narrative through a moment in time.