An artist’s studio is a place of struggle and triumph, of delight and despair. It is where theatrics is replaced with vulnerability, show with substance. It is where an artist is most himself, alone with the madness from which he churns meaning. This, of course, does not mean that all artistic traditions are identical. A studio, that way, is the litmus for an artist’s personality. As Kishore Singh writes in the photo book, Portrait of an Artist, it plays different roles for different artists. For Vincent van Gogh, it was his asylum where he rendered even the walls that confined him into art. For his contemporary Claude Monet, the sprawling beauty of the French countryside was his studio.
A studio is a reflection, not just of the artist but also of his art. It could not have been a soothing space for someone like F.N. Souza, whose art came from an essentially angry place. “Every brush stroke makes me recoil like a snake struck with a stick,” Singh quotes him in the book. “I hate the smell of paint. Painting for me is not beautiful. It is as ugly as a reptile. I attack it.” For his contemporary Avinash Chandra, his process consisted of stripping down to the bare essentials in his heated London basement studio before starting to paint. He would stare at the canvas for a long time before putting a red dot on it. And then, it was “like a dam bursting”, said his wife. He would paint without a break.
Rohit Chawla
Portrait of an Artist is a series of 67 photographs of artists in their studios, as shown through Rohit Chawla’s lens and Singh’s text. Chawla has been seriously shooting the artists for the last 10 years, starting with Anjolie Ela Menon. “I have always been fascinated by creative practitioners, be it authors, architects or artists,” the veteran photographer told THE WEEK. “Shooting them is my way of getting to know them and trespassing into their minds.”
Chawla says he wanted to consciously move away from his background in advertising for the book. He spent nearly two decades at JWT, becoming its national film chief and creative director before quitting to join India Today and Open, where he conceptualised and photographed over 400 covers. Today, he runs his own design and film production company. In 2023, Chawla won India’s first Industry Craft Gold Lion at Cannes, followed by Grand Prix honours at Spikes Asia and the Abbies in 2024. “In the world I came from—advertising, fashion, the glossed-over grandeur of magazine celebrity—I found it strange, almost theatrical, how portraits were manufactured,” he writes. “There was always a cast: stylists, makeup teams, hair architects, digital retouchers on standby to coax a dimple, soften a shadow, erase a history. And in the middle of it all, the subject ‘performing’ not for the camera, but for their own myth.” Chawla wanted to leave all this. So he began to photograph ‘alone’, with no assistants or artificial lights. “I’m not interested in capturing identities as they are presented, but in waiting for them to falter just enough,” he writes. “For something human to show through the scaffolding.”
And that is exactly what he does. His photographs are more a mood than a scene, a feeling than a tableau. There is something restrained—a kind of muted activity, life waiting to unspool from the frames. At the centre are the artists in all their diversity, each with her own rituals. If Ela Menon listens to Hindustani classical and Western baroque music while working in her studio, Anju Dodiya reads Russian poetry and Arpana Kaur listens to Gurbani kirtans. For Jayasri Burman, the studio is a sacred space where Goddess Saraswati must be propitiated before she can begin work. For Atul Dodiya, his studio is not just a space of meditation, but also of engagement. He has a huge library, with books on everything from ancient art to tapestries to poetry. He might pick out a book at random, “something to dip into, briefly or in depth, to feed his mood or his ideas”. The studio for him, he says, “is a space that invokes, that provokes, that generates ideas and art—it means everything to me; it is my survival.” For Subodh Gupta, the studio is a multi-purpose space where he might take a nap on the sofa when he’s tired, work on his sculptures or gather his team to get their opinion on a work.
Paresh Maity has a fixed routine that involves a vigorous morning walk, yoga and a massage before he gets down to the business of painting or sculpting. Music plays in the background and he paints with single-minded dedication, interrupted only by his support team who knows just when to serve his ginger-spiked black tea with a bowl of moori (a Bengali snack made from puffed rice). For Satish Gujral, the studio is his refuge where he transforms his demons—the atrocities he witnessed during Partition while ferrying migrants from Pakistan to India—into art. “I paint to defend myself against fate,” he said.
Sacred space: For Subodh Gupta, the studio is a multi-purpose space.
Chawla picked those artists whose work resonated with him. He was looking for a glimpse of vulnerability. “Yesterday I was in Mumbai interviewing Atul Dodiya for an art series,” he says. “I was struck by the humility of the boy from Ghatkopar. Whereas there is this other breed of nouveau artists who speak a cold, obtuse language which rings so false.” If the photographs reveal much about the artists in their studio, they reveal a fair bit about the photographer as well—his discipline, hunger for authenticity and ability to bring out the humanity in his subjects. For a boy who got into photography for some extra money to take his girlfriend to the cinema, Chawla sure has come a long way.
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
Photographs by Rohit Chawla
Text by Kishore Singh
Published by Mapin Publishing and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Price Rs2,500; pages 297