About Milind's Paintings

I am only an occasional visitor of shows of modern art and certainly a rare buyer of modern paintings. I first encountered the work of Milind when my friend Akumal Ramachander, a native of Milind's own city of Bangalore, showed me several watercolors in a store-room at the back of a London gallery. They were all of flowers or foliage and were sizeable pictures for watercolors, but watercolors was not what you first took them to be -- nor what they were, by any standard notion of 'watercolor'. I came face to face with Milind's extraordinary technique in the medium almost everything is done with the palette knife.

The effect is unique. The flower pictures have a sinuousness and sinewiness, and intensity of line and curve, an almost sculptural sense of depth and relief that have little to do with watercolors, even something studied, but Milind's paintings are anything but static. Even when he might be capturing --- and capturing expertly -- the limpid beauty of a fully opened bloom, or the play of hot light and cool shadow through a mesh of leaves, there is a vibrant rhythm and sway, as if everything(and this may have to do with the quickness demanded by the palette-knife technique) is caught in mid-dance.

But the palette knife is not so important. It is only a technique, if a very striking one, and technique only matters if it is the partner of spirit. What really excited me about those pictures, and many others I have seen since, was their joyousness, a joy in themselves and a joy in giving joy, which made much of the work on display in the public rooms of the London gallery (some by well-known names which I'd better not mention) seem dull, mechanical or tricksy.

Joy, vitality, energy. Of course, as soon as you use such words you are aware of provoking the suspicion or condescension of art critics, of raising their high brows just a bit higher. 'Naive', 'simple', 'unschooled' might be the words that follow. Not so. Milind knows what he is doing. There is experience and decision and discipline in his work, including the discipline of knowing when to let discipline go, to let discipline vie creatively with indiscipline. So much of the joy is in the color, which can be unabashedly bold (even too bold, at first, to a North European used to more sombre tones) but also subtle, modulated and mobile. Take the first watercolor of his I bought (one of the first set I saw), which gives prominence to five tender mauve-blue blooms. There they float, serenely, in the centre while the rest of the picture is a brimming, writhing throng of greens turning to yellow and back to green again.

That same painting could not exhibit better how, for all their astonishing immediacy, Milind's pictures have real structure, they are truly built --words which yet don't do justice to an effect so organic and dynamic. But the instinct for structure, for structure which is alive, tense and even volatile, becomes more apparent in the abstract work. The abstracts, for me, even defy the word 'abstract', or at least that sense of abstract which tends towards the merely composed. The marvel, indeed, of Milind's abstracts is that something so energetic, so full of quickness and drama, can yet have composure, yet obey the laws of harmony. The feeling is not of violence, though violence is there, but of thrill -- of joy.

I am now the proud owner of four paintings of Milind. To see them on my walls is a daily exhilaration. I feel immensely privileged to have made, with the help of Akumal Ramachander, my own personal discovery of a wonderful artist I believe the whole world will soon discover and delight in.

© Graham Swift, 2001
Graham Swift is the author of "Last Orders" which won the Booker prize for 1996 and which has been filmed in Hollywood with Michael Caine in the lead.