K for Kentucky

I had a long weekend this past weekend, so I drove (eight hours!) to Lexington, Kentucky to see my friend Casey. We had a good time, hanging out, catching up with "Lost", eating sushi, visiting the two (!) comic book stores that are within walking distance of his house. Color me jealous. The above photo was taken from the parking lot of his apartment building as I was leaving: you can't quite get a sense of just how pink the sky really was that morning. It was glorious.

While I was there, I forced Casey to get a library card since, well, that's my job now, ya dig? So we trucked it on down to the main branch of the Lexington Public Library, which, honestly, aside from the sheer number of homeless men taking shelter from the rain in the cafe area, was pretty impressive. Well, actually, the homeless men were sort of impressive, too, but not quite as positively. It had the world's largest ceiling clock, a cafe, a little gallery. It also had a staggering amount of graphic novels; I annoyed Casey by insisting that he had to read various examples, such as, say, Watchmen.

But anyways, the gallery had a little exhibition of photographs of tea plantations in Thailand and whatnot, nice photographs, if hardly overwhelming. But we also found a pamphlet for an exhibition called Miniature Worlds: Art from India, which I decided we definitely had to go see. I am so glad we did.

I absolutely love these paintings of India. I love the stylistic flourishes, the flatness and graphic beauty of the images. These artists loved color, and knew how to use it; they also had little use for perspective, or for anatomy. The paintings tend to look a little cartoony, which, truth to tell, is part of the appeal for me. But the images are absolutely exquisite, and immaculately detailed -- enough so that you are issued a magnifying glass at the beginning of the exhibit.

Some of the graphic shorthand that is at play can be lost in translation -- it seems, for example, that any figure colored blue is either Vishnu or being associated with Vishnu in the mind of the viewer -- but the tags that accompanied each work did a lot to fill in the gaps, and I have an elementary knowledge of Hinduism, which also helped. A lot of the work, unsurprisingly, revolved around Hindu myths or legends, which was just as well; the few examples of portraiture that was exhibited were underwhelming. Part of the cartooniness of the art is the fact that the people represented are almost wholly symbolic: they are who they are by what they wear, or what they are doing, or their size in relation to other figures, or the number of arms they have. If you go by their faces, they almost all look the same; the faces are secondary and unrepresentative, similar to what you find in Egyptian art. This is also similar to what you tend to find in comic books. I love it.

As a "pendant" to this exhibition, they also had a room that featured an exhibition called THE INNER EYE: Folk Art of India. These artworks were all contemporary, and I have to say that they came as an enormous (pleasant) surprise to me. They were painted or drawn, indeed, in a simple, folky style, but the works themselves really appealed to me. They weren't as mythologically oriented as the main exhibition was, and at least one of the works dealt specifically with modern events -- specifically, the tsunami of 2004. Some of the works initially seemed to be little more than a childish drawing, with simplified figures against an abstract background, but when you look closer you see the stippling, evenly distributed dots or dashes providing tonal contrast between different objects in the drawings. This was the case with Ganesh Jogi and Teju Ben, who started drawing late in life, and their children, who elaborate on the styles their parents developed. Montu and Joba Chitrakar work in what seems to be a much more narrative, traditional style, which comes from the fact that for their caste, painting scrolls developed out of a desire to illustrate stories as they were being told. These works tended to be larger and more colorful, less personal and more epic in scope.

Honestly, all the artwork in this exhibition made me really happy.