It might be a matter of contention but a painting is a finished piece; a meditated, glossy, conclusive finality. Bracketed and closed-down. A sketch, however, is immediate. And a sketchbook, by that logic, is quite confessional. It is unguarded, undecided, unmeditated, as if speech was painting, thoughts were sketches. The raw mullings of an artist that come even before he's quite worked out what he thinks.
That is the premise of In Another Mode: Sudhir Patwardhan's Drawings 1970–2000, opening at Vadehra Art Gallery this weekend — and again, it is, pointedly, not a painting show. Two hundred drawings, spanning three decades from 1971 — and some rather tumultuous decades they were — when Patwardhan was still a medical student, are being shown for the first time as a body of work in their own right, curated by the art historian R. Siva Kumar.
