Artist of the floating world

It is fashionable these days to speak of alternative career and lifestyles. Powerful company directors and CEO’s are giving up boardrooms and have found joy in growing organic vegetables and cheese making. At an age when most men are on the fast track, Deviprasad C Rao, fondly known as Dev, has shifted gears and changed lanes. A BCom graduate, journalist, and IT professional into marketing and public relations, Dev turned his back on this world of updating and upgrading, strategy and networking. He now spends his days painting. And quietly but firmly asserts that he has chosen the way of the artist is the only way for him.

Gustav Flaubert once counseled writers, “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you maybe violent and original your work.” Precise arrangements of graphite, pastels, crayons, pencils, brushes, colours line the walls of his small living and working space. Deviprasad himself is a study in understatement, dressed in chinos and white linen shirts. As Flaubert recognized, the external order of the work space can belie the spontaneity and primitive urges that activate the imagination. Deviprasad’s work has a playfulness that is witty terms of both narrative and of the form. The lines, dots, shapes, squiggles, appear to defy gravity, suspended in space. He is an artist of the floating world.

Born in Koteshwara, a small pilgrim town near Kundapur of Udupi district (Near Mangalore) in Karnataka state (India), his father was art teacher forced to renounce his first love and switch to catering to make ends meet. Deviprasad had a disturbed childhood and recalls with evident pain that poverty necessitated that he be raised by various relatives. At the age of 8 he saw a beautiful painting on a visit to his uncle’s home which he later learnt had been painted by his father. This painting, he says, was a catalyst in his young life. He  to paint with keenness using all sorts of material – water colours, oils, pastels, in short, whatever he could get his hands on. Always inclined to the arts, Deviprasad later studied theatre and dramatics and became a ‘Yakshagana’ and Mime performing artist. However, he says, a career in the arts seemed selfish and unrealistic since he considered it his duty to support his family.  

Deviprasad was married and has two boys, Devakanta and Mitra. Following a great deal of emotional turbulence in his marriage, he decided to give up his PR consultancy work and head for Goa to make a fresh start. On his arrival in Calangute, he started an art gallery with the help of his cousin. He hoped to secure his financial position and be able to meet his family commitments. Without a safety net he managed to hold regular exhibitions including all the major painters in Goa and established himself as curator and art critic for leading local news papers. Simultaneously he also painted and conducted art exploration programmes for children and adults.

Art became his redemption and healer. However, it was in 2002 after his trip to Barcelona (Spain), where he saw the original works of Miro, Picasso, Gaudi and Dali that he made up his mind to be a full time painter. Being relatively unencumbered by academic training he was able to move easily and almost directly into abstraction. His aesthetic thinking from the start was in terms of formalistic solutions which take precedence over representational considerations. Given the small size of the art community in Goa, Deviprasad started right out getting to know another generation of artists. His friendships with artists such as Antonio E Costa (Goa/Canada), Suhas Shilker (Goa) and Beatriz Maria Villarreal (Mexico), as well as generous patronage and encouragement from art-lover, Verner Velho (Goa), have helped him find his direction.  

Deviprasad’s works, although unpremeditated, are process – based abstractions combined with quirky, child-like imagery and surrealistic poetry. It’s a very unusual combination. Despite the apparent lack of structure there is an inborn sense of symmetry and composition. The center play of empty spaces in his paintings is one of the most interesting parts of his work. They are infused with light and poetry.

In its playfulness and sexuality, Deviprasad’s work possesses influences of Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramist, Joan Miro. There is also an element of deconstruction reminiscent of the work of Philip Guston and Robert Ryman. Drawing is a critical part of his practice and in his work, drawing can also be a painting. His mentors would insist that he did hundreds of drawings and may be this is the reason his line is so free and assured, like a child drawing a pirate ship on a garden with a lawn and neat flower beds filled in with patches, scratches and blobs of blues pinks and greens.

Deviprasad says people often remark how his work lends itself to various possibilities like jewelry, fashion design, interior and installation. Having also worked on murals, Deviprasad would like to learn the process in detail.

Spiritual reading and meditation, particularly Osho, and teaching art therapy have been really positive, clarifying  experiences for Deviprasad, he is finally at home with himself. His works, Deviprasad hopes, will engage everyone, including the very young and very old. It should not be difficult for his instinctive savant-like skill gives him an alchemist’s power. The willingness to move in new artistic directions wherever they may take him, is rooted in Deviprasad’s personal audacity, a trait that one might not at first meeting easily suspect in the man, ‘there must always be a journey with in’, he says.

- Swatee Nair
(Artist and Art Critic based in Goa, India)
May - 2007