Shyam with lemon tree, in the Last Ship backyard, November 2023.

Shyam Thandar

Born in 1972, Shyam Thandar is a self-taught artist. He started painting out of the blue one night in October 2018 and has not stopped ever since. A fatherless child since he was eight years old, he has had all kinds of odd jobs and wanderings since his teenage and could not finish his schooling despite studying hard and paying his own school expenses. Working across West Bengal and South-West India as an amateur circus performer (after learning gymnastics and performance), a lawyer's clerk in Calcutta (for two years), to bus conductor (for 16 years) in a colliery town, man Friday (cook, caregiver and personal assistant, 2012 to 2014) of artist K G Subramanyan in Baroda and recently an employee in artist Jogen Chowdhury's private museum in Kolkata (kitchen staff, office worker – 2018 to 2021), he has seen and lived life in very many ways.

When Shyam Thandar visited Khajuraho in February 2023, he found delights in unexpected places and disappointments in the expected ones. The very first flight of his life – he found it full of too much waiting, too many security checks, strict rules and bad food. But the joy of having a God's eye view from the aircraft window was so strong that he had to draw them down in his sketchbook within an hour of landing, before the sensation left his body.

Viewing the temples and their tiny erotic friezes for the consecutive three days, he was surprised by how they loom much larger in the popular imagination and the popular print merchandise than in their stone-cut realities. The Khajuraho also seemed a place devoid of eros to him, as if the gods' and demigods' erotic spirits have flown away from their stone representations. But after a midnight talk near the tank with a local who casually mentioned, over his light beer, how Yoginis routinely land and show themselves to him on many nights, he was a bit more reassured.

Shyam's eyes, used to celebrate Indian gods and demigods in their technicolor glory (Bengali clay and pith idols painted and dressed to the nines), found the sandstone coloured deities of Khajuraho a bit past their prime glory. Again, when he learnt of their possibly polychrome past, he was somehow relieved.

The themes of freedom, fossils (especially of flowers), flying demigods (and humans), the ebbing eros of Khajuraho in the need of revival and working in a large three dimensional space with all the artistic tools at his disposal, colours, paper, clay, and waste have been playing in his mind since he visited the Last Ship Residency space and learnt of its unconventional preference for artists.