Champaklal - The Artist and a Yogi

Marbling

Champaklal did over seven hundred paintings by the marbling technique. The Mother gave titles to many of these paintings after looking into the movement of forces they suggested; these revelatory captions focus on the hidden meaning they represent. To those who are sensitive in their imagination and can feel the inner impact of these pictures, they bring a strong sense of the wondrous—an outburst of light and delight taking mystic and dynamic colour shapes through the inspiration of an artist who has striven to lose himself in the Unknown.

We may say that in one sense there is nothing in life or art like accident, chance or fluke, even when the result is most unexpected. Marbling is a fine field of experimentation in which unpredictable, unimaginable forces play through what is apparently accidental. It is a new line of creative work far removed from the traditional. Like surrealism and painting in trance or a half-conscious condition, marbling can be a field for the expression of hidden influences and occult movements and realities. Certainly this should not be made a fetish; to go beyond its suggestive limits would be to turn it into a pseudo art-form, a decorative jugglery of some sort.

(Ref: Champaklal as an artist. 1st Edition. P: 87 & 21)

Picture 43, Champaklal is an artist

Picture 44, Champaklal is an artist

Champaklal's Diary Notes on Marbling

1951-04-07

7.4.1951

Long ago someone came on a visit and exhibited some of his coloured photographs in our Library. They were not of any objects but they were very colourful and impressionistic. Mother liked them very much. She called Robi Ganguli, talked to him at length about the technique and gave him some specific instructions and asked him to try it. I saw that he was very enthusiastic, but nothing further happened. I reminded Robi abour it but it was no use. I had a keen interest in it and wanted to do something like that but did not know how to proceed.

Then one day Amiyo Ganguli brought some paintings and showed them to Mother. She liked them and asked him how they were done. After he left, Mother showed me the paintirigs and said she would ask Amiyo to show me the technique. She told me that this process was known as marbling. (Here I must record that the first person to do marbling in our Ashram was the artist Sanjiban.)

Today was the day the Mother had asked Amiyo to come up- stairs and demonstrate the marbling process in the meditation room. He came at 10.30 a.m. with the necessary things. Mother had kept some colours ready and a brush in a tray which was filled with water, but not to the brim. Amiyo took a piece of paper and put it over the colours that he had put on the surface of the water. The result was marbled paper. Thereafter Mother tried it out herself on two sheets of paper. I understood the process properly.

The next day I did three paintings, using a brush in some places. I placed these paintings on the long table along the window in the corridor outside Mother's boudoir, so that Mother could see them on her way back from Balcony darshan. When she saw them she asked who had done them. She was surprised when I said they were mine. She had thought that someone must have sent them from abroad. She exclaimed: “Yours! Wonderful! Very nice! Pretty! I like it.” She had not expected that I would be able to do this from what Amiyo had shown me. Seeing her happy expression I continued to make more of these paintings. She said that one day she would see all of them.

A day was fixed and I took 47 paintings to her. I showed them to her one by one and she wrote down the number and significance of each one on a small pad. At the same time she asked me to write down the number on the painting and she checked to see if I had done it correctly. In this way she saw the whole lot in one sitting.

Later on she gave significances to my other paintings also. At times she would ask for birthday folders with these paintings on them and would write the significance below them. As in every thing, her encouragement was extremely helpful in my painting.

(Ref: Champaklal Speaks. 3rd Edition. P: 211-212)