Why, I imagine someone saying, are you doing these endless drawings of obscure bronze sculptures and carved stone? Do I ask myself that question? Only slightly. I'm wondering how this is different to drawing landscape or figures or making abstracts. It certainly isn't about practising technique (as you might 'practise' drawing real-world objects) and the aim isn't to produce something that will sell, or please others.
Drawing and painting these figures is an exploration. Just as trying to draw the human face reveals details and wonders that would have normally been overlooked, drawing or painting here pulls me in to the image, its form, its texture. But then there's more. I'm absorbed into the effect of time on the surface of the metal, or of wind and rain on stone. I notice that the figure I'm drawing is only half completed, its hands and feet still unformed planes, making it almost abstract. I can almost feel the chisel in the hand of the sculptor, feel the hunger in his belly, wonder if he has khol around his eyes. How many of his descendents have woken again and again to a Indian dawn, washed at the communal pump, and set of for a day's work chiselling stone in the intervening 1000 years? The panel is attached to a huge stone edifice that no-one fully understands, at the centre of which there's a small tight passage covered in paintings of dancers, that was clearly not meant for ordinary worshippers. So many mysteries of art and behaviour, leaving only these tantalising trails in the material world of 2012.
This image, which at first seemed to be a yogic goddess, seated in meditation, with attendants and a royal parasol, turned out to be a version of Shiva that I had never heard of - an emanation of the female principle, giving him the breasts and belly of a woman....
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