Greetings!
I am Kanth Risa. Living in the moment and relishing every minute to the fullest is my outlook to life. I was born and brought up in a small town in Mahboobnagar. I moved to Hyderabad years ago with an open mind - I said to myself, “I will have no morose or regrets in going back home if my ideas about art and about the kind of work I want to do bear no fruit.” I always pour my heart out on canvases but I am not the kind of person anybody with urban sensibilities would call ‘ambitious’. In fact, the ways of city life amused me during my initial years in Hyderabad.
For me, art is an internal revolution. I have been through different phases in my life resisting or fearing none of its ebbs and tides. That is how I continue to live. Sometimes I have let my art reflect a certain phase. While on other times it is my observation on current society, its dilemmas, and the existential anxiety of individuals it is peopled by.
But most of the times the art is objective - I believe that one just needs to be there, soak in the experience of gazing and marveling at a piece of art. With due respect to the press and art critics, I would say that interpretations, analysis, reviews and critique are not always required. Likewise, I have also been just as objective when I painted those very pieces. Objective art has its own quality to transform.
In my collection Needles, my recent series, I have shown you ways in which a human being can be ‘needled’ or pricked. After all, it is only through internal disturbance that transformation happens in an individual. It is not that discomfort, pain and disturbance by themselves have something valuable to offer. But they are natural fallouts when one is venturing out of a warm familiar zone. Presenting Needles……
(statement written by Lakshmi Vishwanathan)
