• Fareed Uduman mixes his colours with tears! 

A review on my father's (Fareed Uduman) work was written by the late journalist Winston de Valliere but was never published. It becomes very relevant now as the Fareed Uduman Art Forum is about to launch an exhibition “Kindred Flames: van Gogh and Uduman”. Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh never saw Sri Lanka. Uduman never saw Arles (in France). They never met. They never influenced one another. Yet, they both painted: suffering, labour, loneliness, compassion, nature, hope, and the resilience of ordinary people. In preparation to view this exhibition, I am sure that the people of Sri Lanka would like to understand the works of Uduman which de Valliere aptly describes here. 

“Not for the socialite looking for an evening of pleasure in the glories of life and nature brought alive in tumultuous colour on the artist’s canvas. Uduman brings to you life in the raw, life in the ‘being and knowing’ of experiencing another’s pain…and hopelessness…a kind of metaphysical tryst with that one common thread of uncomforted pain that runs through the lives of the underprivileged and the exploited. His art is not as many would want to know it. Uduman takes you beyond the immediately discernible universe, and to eyes that can see and spirits that can respond, he takes you into the realms of human suffering that cries desperately for redress. His art is not art in the common sense. What he brings to the Sri Lankan cultural milieu is life in the raw, masquerading as art…And so, he takes another’s pain and desperation, another’s plaintive and muted pleadings, fills them on the palette of art, mixes them with their tears…and his…and challenges the uncaring pilgrim to respond with caring. There is loads of idealism mixed into his imagery, impressions and symbolisms..but, to the discerning, he does take the otherwise inscrutably mute voices of poverty, makes them plainly visible and takes you into that realm of ‘being, feeling and knowing’ as one with their anguish .. one with their angst against an uncaring world. Not all his subjects speak clearly to the man who cannot probe the depths of Uduman’s soul. The white, fully fleshed cockerel in an abandoned sitting room is simply a servant wandering through a house, doomed, he (or she) knows, to a life at the master’s service…is free to live off the crumbs on the kitchen floor. The rooster must end up in a plate of devilled chicken – Kismet! As with the exhausted bull, symbolic of the exploited labour class whose sufferings were part of Uduman’s cry in life. But interspersed in the pathos is the odd man who cares for the labourer (a man bathing his bull) and exultation as one bull breaks free of his yoke, the cart flung aside, his head up in a bellow of victory! Not all are fortunate. Not the women, not the children. His Mona Lisa’s (painting by the Italian Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci) are the stuff of British-American poet Wystan Hugh Auden’s pen, the hopelessness of life mirrored in the eyes, nay, the plaintive cry for deliverance, in the exposed breasts of a maiden at a wayside tap, doomed to a life of poverty, unwanted by a man of the kind she would want for a husband. The world of the lost…so often visited by this man who went in search of the lost just to comfort them. The paintings are his cry to you and to me, pleading to stir ourselves also to care just a little bit more…and to do something about it.

One cannot help recall…and paraphrase, Russian poet Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky’s words, “To cry when another weeps, that one boy knives another to death; that a girl is raped, left dead in a sordid back-alley room; that a well-aimed stone kills a mother bird taking food for her young”…mere axioms to those who cannot feel, cannot care, cannot cry. To the discerning, Uduman says, “This, this utter anguish and angst, is the ultimate reality of life that can be seen if you will but begin to care.”

There is the pathos of inevitable death and a despair that can be seen in a little boy carrying a coconut…too large for him to get at the life-giving water and flesh within…and yet, the coiffured, ethereal woman looks down at sans feeling. Life, at hand yet out of reach…or the sacrificial goat rushing around in panic, trapped in the inescapable prison of a human dwelling.

Some of his work will invite you to the philosophical speculation with his spirit, such as the dead man with two dead birds upon his breast, one entangled in the chain around his neck. Uduman’s mastery of metaphysics finds full expression here as he says that even in death a man’s spirit can remain trapped in his death. The poverty, hopelessness, anger and angst are tangible. But, as Auden would have it, if after having absorbed his message, you also “Come to the place where your fathers did before you, where feelings mock, then believe your pain”. If you can discern Uduman, his brush will tear the façade of imperturbability off your face and you simply cannot dismiss his work as the gloom of the moralist, simply because your lack of caring is laid bare AND HIS SPIRIT MOCKS YOU. You would still have to avoid all the by-lanes and slums of this world where sufferings abound if you ever hope to escape his accusing brush, pointing at you from his subjects.

In life, Uduman was an unapologetic judge and jury, a humanist who cared…deeply.

Maybe, just maybe, should you incline your ear, you might hear his verdict about you. Axioms? Or do we care? That is the point of Uduman’s art. Nothing can be more sublime surely? End.”

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication