Portrait artists capture ancestors’ smiles, birthmarks & bushy brows

MUMBAI: At 10.15 am, the tall Nitin Shah emerges from the glass doors of his pooja room, touches two framed images adorned with garlands of satin roses and invites something invisible into his chest. His prayer thus complete, this 59-year-old owner of a textile printing company can get on with his day. “My parents are next to god,” says Shah, referring the austere, kurta-clad man with disheveled eyebrows and the bespectacled, Gujarati sari-clad woman with a benign smile who live behind non-reflective glass covers.“I have never seen my grandmother,” says Shah's son, Nishant. “But everyone tells me this is how she looked live,” he says, pointing to the charcoal portrait.
Two years ago, Shah's parents were mostly made of pixels but ever since they moved into a sprawling new house in Santacruz, they have morphed into elaborate grey outlines that inspire guests to admire their wrinkles and strands. It was in 2013, before the housewarming party that Shah commissioned these charcoal portraits at the hands of artist Gayatri Mehta. “I did not have good photos of my parents,” says Shah, whose mother passed away three days after his wedding and father who left him in 1997. “I am an art lover and wanted something valuable,” adds the textile businessman, whose siblings, two of whom live abroad, have even taken pictures of the portraits and hung them in their homes.
Technically, commissioning a portrait in memory of a departed family member should have been a redundant practice in the age of digital photography. Yet, artists in the city will tell you of people, mostly upper-class businessmen, but also other art-lovers, who are willing to shell out anywhere between Rs 40,000 to a lakh for a memorial portrait, some as small as an A4 sheet. The reason isn't necessarily the lack of good photos but also the promise of an artist's eye for detail. “It is the difference between flying to Everest and climbing it,” says renowned portrait artist Vasudeo Kamath, explaining the allure of the manually-constructed portrait over a photograph. “The client is looking for likeness and the stock expression, here, is usually a smile. But a good portrait goes beyond that,” says Kamath, adding different artists focus on different things — light, costume and background.
While decoding facial features from washed out black-and-white photographs, these painters morph into sketch artists — building features from description. The more questions they ask, the better the resemblance. Is that a spot on the photograph or a birthmark? Was he or she fair? Does anyone in the family resemble them? Is the smile camera-conscious or genuine? Virar-based artist Akshay Pai once handled a portrait in Sawantwadi in Sindhudurg for a client's great great grandfather, a curly-haired man with a handlebar moustache, who died in the late 1800s. “I had no reference except for a miniature drawn by a school teacher, which the family used to worship,” says Pai, a former signboard painter who accumulated every detail from the tilt of the nose to face for the acrylic painting which took him two months. In fact, once when artist Manoj Sakale received an out-of-focus image from a journalist, he sat the journalist down on learning that he resembled his father and finished the portrait in three hours. “When his sister came home and saw the portrait, she couldn't hold back her tears,” he recalls.
While there is a demand for portraits, there aren't enough artists. “Art students are interested more in creative paintings rather than portraiture,” says Gayatri Mehta, who remained unmarried to devote herself to representational art — tedious study of the anatomy. “Since memorial portraits involve sentiments, you can't afford distortion,” says Gayatri Mehta, who runs every stage of the work in progress by the family. This is also why Kamath prefers to meet the families directly and does not accept projects from intermediaries.
A memorial portrait isn't merely a sketch but a resurrection of sorts, say artists. To make a subject come alive, Sakale, who has etched everyone from the late Ghulam Ali to Shahu Maharaj, takes into account the stature, body language and even history. When the teacher of a law college in Sangli passed away, the college's brief to Sakale was to render him in the pose of a political leader. He gathered as many photos — even those of him at a younger age and was delighted to discover one in which the teacher was climbing a staircase, a hand on the railing. Sakale's mind quickly conjured up a table, a telephone, a stack of law books with the top one open which the austere professor stood and browsed through in a five-ft-by-three-and-a-half-ft portrait.
Though they can't stray too far away from natural physiology, artists are sometimes forced to reconfigure expressions and even bone structure on request. Recently, a prominent industrialist handed an artist who did not wish to be named, a photograph of both his late parents. In the mother's image, her jaw appeared a bit asymmetrical. It's always been that way, assured the industrialist who insisted that the artist fix it in the portrait. The artist hesitantly obliged but when he called the client for feedback, pat came the reply: “Everyone appreciated the father's portrait.” Sakale, on the other hand, recalls a curious businessman who loved his father's portrait but protested: “He was never so pleasant.”