SILLY TIMES

Try to catch the essence of our living among the walking dead. Dead from heart and mind.

THE COLLECTIBLES

The Collectibles, pen and ink on printed card, Artist : Soumen Bhowmick, 2014

What else you want to collect for mere existence in this station hole, called home. Starting with the day we first breathe in, the pursuit of collection starts. Collect kisses, embraces, get that rare bottle of single malt, have the latest gizmos, the shining stones and few more dollars. 

Not happy with that…want more, go for it man grab those fast cars, pluck those juicy lips, smother those fickle beautiful bodies, marry the most gorgeous, give birth to the most happening, wear all those labels, go ahead make my day buddy. The big, the bad, the shining, the loudest and the beautiful, collectibles galore in this world of fickle moments of existence. Have them all.

Put a stamp of ‘I’ and ‘MINE’ in all things you can lay your eyes on. Collecting moments of glory is the best pass-time. Success has to be there or else you die. Failure is a crime, punishable with insult hurled upon the demoralized soul. Collect glory at all cost. Everything is now. The time has come to grab your moment. The light is low and the stage is crowded, so hurry. Push the weak and be mean. Collecting all and the best should be your paramount thought forever.

Finally just dug out your soul and lay it on the dirt and stomp on it hard, really hard…just kill the damn thing!


By : Soumen Bhowmick
October, 2014

BlueAnt Digital Talks to Soumen Bhowmick

There is so much happening in the ‘creative’ fields these days. There are conferences on how creative organizations must come together to form a ‘creative industry’ (wink wink, you know which one I’m talking about). New sites sites come up everyday, some of which show you 20Gifs that are apparently funny and assert your ‘Indian-ness’ at the same time. We now have ‘pop-up shops’, secret networking dinners for 20 people and invite only indie movie screenings. For us at BlueAnt Digital, its getting hard to keep up with it all.

And that’s only when we ‘actually’ get to leave office. Events aside, for all of us, leaving the office-dungeon at an earthly hour has become a daily struggle that would put the Gandalf-Balrog face off to shame.

So, we thought, if we can’t go to the action, lets bring the action to us. Starting last week, we started ‘BlueAnt Digital Talks’, a series of interactions in which we invite people from the creative fields to come and chat us up. The talks have no agenda and nothing is off-topic. The theme is simply to let creative minds engage, interact and caffeinate.

For our first BlueAnt Digital Talk, we invited Artist (and ex-advertising creative) Soumen Bhowmick to come talk to us. Soumen spoke to us about the difference between ‘art’ and ‘communication’, the aggressive one needs to sell media, his journey from being a commercial artist, advertiser, magazine illustrator to a gallery-only-art-for-arts-sake artist. Soumen recently concluded his first solo exhibition at the Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi, called ‘Head Tale’. You can read about it here.

You can see some what he spoke to us about, in the series of ‘creatives’ below.

Head Tale: Effective for now but..

Review : Soumen Bhowmick / Johny ML (Art Critic & Curator, India)

Published on : www.cartanart.com, 01/04/2014

Soumen Bhowmick, in person, represents the quintessential image of an artist; fragile, soft, 
animated while speaking and dignified. Often when such artists exhibit in community galleries 
like Triveni in Delhi, despite their sincere efforts they do not get enough print or visual media space. Friendly folks who walk in would look at the works dispassionately or at times patronizingly. Artists, unlike in the mainstream galleries, here are eager to talk to you, get a comment from you. A word of appreciation makes them happier than a real purchase because they know, even in these post-boom years, words of encouragement matter more than money. Most of these artists find benevolent patrons in due course of time; these patrons support them by buying their works not as investments but as a gesture of appreciation and love. Critics use their words to encourage (sometimes, to discourage) and patrons use their money to do the same (sometimes, to spoil the artists).

Part (F.N.) Souza, part (Francis) Bacon, part (Philip) Guston, part (Ernst) Neiztvestny, 
part (George) Grosz and part (Bengali) folk artists, these works of Soumen Bhowmick 
are the meeting point of various pictorial traditions. In this solo show titled ‘Head Tale’, 
what one sees is a series of human heads done over the last five years and interestingly 
not a single human head resemble any real human head or anything near to it. The artist’s 
attempt is not to capture the very similitude of the human heads that we see milling 
around us today but his intention is to look at the ways in which these heads take shape 
in his own ‘head’. This is a way of perceiving people, not exactly as people but as 
creatures of a magical world. For an artist like Soumen Bhowmick, reality or the real world 
around him is a series of appearances and from a peculiar perspective human beings lose their perceived charm and they become creatures distorted by protrusions, intrusions and organic growths.

How does an artist come to view human beings in this way? Either it should be an outcome of the complete loss of faith in human beings as sublime entities or it should come from a belief that human beings who show beautiful countenances to others hide so many weird things in their minds. When the social structures demand a certain kind of behavioral pattern from people, theirs become a tortured existence as they fail to express their innate desires and cruelties within the controlled environment. That means human societies are perverted zones of permanent repressions. Soumen Bhowmick not only sees other people as creatures living within human forms but also sees himself as one, often as a victim or a saint tortured by the arrows of accusations. This pictorial device has been used by many artists aforementioned as protest, disparage and as active rebellion. In an absolutely changed social context, Soumen can emulate this stylistic device only to express his angst.

In his statement, Soumen says that his works are inspired by the scenes from the streets where faces pile up. He feels like giving them a comic twist and an ironic edge. In their distorted selves they look like clowns in a carnival, a menacing carnival of deception. Here notionally Soumen stands closer to Peter Brueghel who had depicted the human vices both perceived and imagined. However, I feel that Soumen needs to move a little further to articulate his views; an urgent departure from heads and faces is demanded. The danger of getting stuck to this language is palpable, which would eventually blunt his critical paintings and they would turn into decorative design with a signature style.

CARRY ON FOOLS

Trapped, pen and ink on paper, Artist : Soumen Bhowmick

No matter what you do or what your mind make your think, it's always darkness around here.

Fools do exist in my world of mediocrity and sin. They thrive and take a long time to perish.

They enter your world with free will and vanquish your sanity with their foolishness. 

That's their beauty dear.

Art is now a fool's business to run. Business, I do call it in all my true senses, not drunk friends, believe me.

Society is punishing us for our indulgences, for our honest lust for freedom. Freedom to express, freedom to

smell that last breath of life, freedom to make love to art, freedom to delve into our dark and lone-some alleys of existence. Freedom is the least available and chased by so many. Art is fooling around for a long time now. Time to face the music of destiny, the song of the forgotten hero will be played now, again and again. Go, take your side with the devil or the vanquished. Your choice will lead you to the depth of no return. The days of glory is now over, dark clouds of doubts are friends around. So just fool around with the clouds of deceit and few choices. Walk the path of hard pebbled roads, moron listen to your soul. For it never lies on purpose. 

The lights in my studio are now dimmed to escape the glare. The once loved images of art openings are

troubling the senses. The crowd is missing, the voices of holy buyers are few and getting rare to find

by every passing day. Carry on with the salvage of your destiny dear friends. We all are left with the fallen air castles that we once  ruled!