C Douglas on loss, absence and danger of being content

The evocative work of C Douglas moves from the personal to the universal and speaks of disconnection, dislocation and disquiet, while dealing with trans-national issues of migration and memory. His latest series of paintings, Blind Poet and Butterflies, that will be presented by InKo Centre (exhibition venue), in association with Dakshina Chitra, will be showcased on November 10. His paintings, a metaphor for modern life, have recurring images of mutilated and hollowed beings. The series combines the mysterious metaphors of the blind poet with the seeing butterfly. 

“Blindness here though doesn’t symbolise a physical handicap, rather a revolt against the autocracy of the eye — denoting a way of viewing beyond what gets physically registered in our mind. Conversely, butterflies are carrying the images of eyes on the back of their wings to deceive and deter predators. So, where the poet tends to feign blindness, the beautiful creature feigns eyes,” explains Douglas.

The series recognises the intrinsic instabilities of language alongside that of the gaze. Blending both text and image, using the word ‘word’ repeatedly, his works illustrate the limits of language as a mode of communication, and how it actually operates within the larger fabric of boundless context and reference. 

He recognises it as built on a system of peculiar arbitrary signs and symbols, concluding that “meaning is not something fixed, but a protean entity forever being formed and reformed set in the crucible of the contemporary society”. 

Kerala-born Douglas moved to Chennai in the early 1970s. He can’t remember exactly which year, but he does recollect why. “I was unhappy and bored in those days, going about reading existentialist literature which everyone was doing in the 1970s,” he says with a smile. 

His pursuit to do something artistic led him to the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai, and there, he found a sense of belonging. “I then started coming to Cholamandal on weekends,” he recalls. He would spend time with people like KCS Paniker and K Ramanujam. “I found meaning and faith to go on. Not religious faith, but faith in life,” he adds quickly.

Over the years, Douglas established himself as one of the eminent artists to emerge from the Madras Art Movement. However, he hasn’t always been in Chennai. After his marriage to Mona, a theatre artiste he met at Max Mueller Bhavan, he shifted based to Germany for a greater part of the 1980s, a period he calls a great learning curve. 

He returned to the city armed with a distinctive style of art, which art lovers and collectors have come to admire – works on textured paper, interspersed with mud, resin and charcoal, filled with poetry, human angst, and, disaster. “I love paper and its impermanence. It echoes my views on the fragility of the human condition,” he adds. While he has built himself a repertoire that few can boast of, the 66-year-old says he will never hang up his boots. “There is danger in being content. I find the idea of contentment uncomfortable. Art and poetry is about wounds, and as a human being, you can never be completely healed or fulfilled,” he finishes.