CROWD PLEASER - Brisbane News

By Phil Brown


Rachel Arthur was so overwhelmed by India and its people, she painted them
ARTIST Rachel Arthur gets the prize for the best exhibition title so far this year (I know it's early days yet). Her show of works on paper and paintings inspired by India is called There Are a Lot of People in India. It takes the bleeding obvious to new heights.
But hey, she's right. There are a lot of people in India, around a billion at last count. Rachel knows. She's been there.
This charming exhibition is the result of her artistic pilgrimage to the
subcontinent, undertaken with a
photographer friend in April 1999.
Fascinated with the idea of Indian culture, Rachel became even more entranced by the reality and was artistically inspired to reflect that in her work.
Foreign culture can often have a regenerative effect on an artist and looking at a lot of work nowadays, one is tempted to suggest that more should travel abroad, more regularly, to broaden their horizons and enliven their work. It worked for the late Donald Friend, whose sojourn in exotic Bali, for example, produced exquisite results.
Rachel, a graduate of the Queensland College of Art and a well-known local illustrator, is a young artist who has had her muse similarly tweaked by plunging herself, however briefly, headlong into a foreign culture.
Her travels took in Calcutta, Darjeeling and the surrounding Himalayan hill country, Jaipur and Agra, home of the world's most famous mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
Of all the myriad observations she made from this trip it was, she explains, the sheer populousness of the place that was most astounding. "You are really engulfed by people there. There is a constant seething mass of people."
In a small, attractive cloth-bound catalogue that she has produced for her exhibition, Rachel continues her ruminations on that.
"For both the introspective foreigner and the average Indian merchant's family, there is no personal space, no boundaries, no lines," she writes.
"Empty space is just waiting to be peopled and is almost as suffocating as the voice and sweat-heavy market."
Of course, the contradiction is that despite that, India is also a place of calm, spirituality and a Mecca for those on the path to enlightenment.
In her work, Rachel isolates motifs, both religious and secular, and explores Indian culture by sampling it - here some Mogul art, there some spiritual images or just scenes of people in daily life.
In The Magenta Moon she explores the culture with a moon that is, she swears, the colour as she saw it. In Go Forth and Multiply, a turbaned man exhorts the people to procreate - something they do pretty successfully. In another work, a serene face is crowned with a third eye and has hair that seems to dissolve into the cosmos.
These are images that tell of a magical, mystical interface with a country that is still rich in experiences of otherness for westerners.
Not that it's all sweetness and light to be a tourist on the ground, though. As Rachel explains, it can be hardgoing for a young western woman, fobbing off the unwanted interest of curious and libidinous Indian men.
During a sketching trip to a monument on one particular day she was followed by a man constantly declaring his undying love. A visit to a temple ceremony on another day was marred by some serious bottom pinching.
All part of the deal when travelling, philosophises Rachel, whose work should attract particular interest at a time when Indian culture, or at least its motifs (which have been appropriated by modern western fashion), are popular and recognisable - signs of an exotic other world.
This is the world Rachel explores. A world with, well, a lot of people in it.
> There Are a Lot of People in India, an exhibition of works by Rachel Arthur, until 11 February at Metro Arts, 109 Edward Street, the City. Open 10am to 4.30pm Sunday to Friday. Phone
3221 1527.

Caption:  Portraits of a people: Rachel Arthurs shares her experiences of India in works such as Go Forth and Multiply, above, and The Magenta Moon
Illus:  Artwork
Photo
Column:  Art Beat
Type:  Art Review


Edition 1WED 02 FEB 2000, Page 027