My Views on Khadi

Artist: David Schorr

April 4, 2003 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

David Schorr is a Professor of Art at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut USA, as well as a Visiting Professor at the National School of Design, Ahmedabad. He is also a painter and has taught printmaking, graphic design, book illustration and presented lectures in various art centers in different countries. He maintains his studio in New York City.

The artist will be presenting a lecture and slide presentation on some of his recent works. These paintings will be exhibited at the Jehangir Art Gallery from April 2-9, 2003 and have grown out of time spent in India, first by learning about the Khadi movement and its role in Gandhian ideology in relation to national autonomy and self rule, the symbolism of white in Indian painting, the abstraction of brown limbs isolated by white clothing combined with a traditional Western academic interest in drapery, as a purely visual and tactile challenge. The canvases of his paintings are actual hand woven Indian cotton and silk textiles and his inspiration, the indigenous clothing of India and the synchronization of the patterns and folds of drapery with the movements of the human body. There is a constant play between opacity and transparence, whiteness and color, flatness and volume, nudity and wrapping, but the spirit of his work is in no sense voyeuristic, but very sensitively captures the aesthetic ritual of folded drapery in the Indian context.