'Simpsons' meets the subcontinent

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland artist Denys Watkins didn't go to India when all his friends did in the early 1970s, setting off from London in Volkswagen vans for the big overland trek.

"I couldn't work out what you did with the van when you got to the bottom of India," he says, musing on the circumstances that took him to the subcontinent three decades later.

The fruits of his residency last year at the Sanskriti Foundation near New Delhi are on display at Bath Street Gallery in Parnell.

The Indian connection is not glaringly obvious - Watkins has never been an artist to hit you around the head - but looking at the varied works in the Jungle Book exhibition it is clear he has been processing new information.

His roots are in pop art, a movement which was emotionally cool but often playful in its examination of the connections between popular culture and art.

He says the Sanskriti opportunity came at a time he was questioning where his work was going.

"I was disillusioned with Western art. The irony and all that crap was just driving me tearful. It was a chance to clean the spark plugs," says Watkins, back in the familiar surroundings of his Mt Eden home.

He spent his initial weeks wandering around Sanskriti and the surrounding villages, soaking up images and trying to find things he could relate to.

"After a month or so of wandering around and being confused and elated and everything else, I bought all this handmade paper and some pigments and started doing all these drawings as a way to loosen up.

"I can't point where these things come from. I did things that were loosely figurative. It was a path to investigate simple colour and make simple shapes which vaguely had a human reference of some sort but weren't specific."

The colours draw from the organic pigments Watkins found in India, and from cartoon shows such as The Simpsons, which he finds himself watching with his grandchildren.

"I think The Simpsons has the greatest colour combinations. That is why I have been using a lot of lilacs and lemon yellows. If I want to reference any form of colour combination, I will reference those people.

"The paintings are also resolutely flat. I was always intrigued with flatness. I have always thought a painting is a 2D surface."

Some of his fascination with flatness came from the Indian paintings he saw decades ago at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which backed on to his studio at the Royal College of Art.

Watkins showed some of his Indian-inspired work earlier this year at Janne Land Gallery in Wellington, but felt that show, titled Mumbo Jumbo, was too "formal and immaculate".

For Jungle Book, he has reworked some of the images and added more layers, painting black-outline representations of the monkey deity Hanuman over his organic blobs, Roy Lichtenstein style.

This Hanuman is mainly in boy scout uniform, reporting for duty.

Watkins says like any former cub scout, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories, with their exotic names and fantastical tales of Indian life, were part of the mental baggage he carried to India.

"There wasn't a logical reason for pulling this in, but there was something about the bureaucracy, the idea about this being part of a structure. One thing you notice about India is the unbelievable layering of bureaucracy that is there, inherited from the British.

"The scouting imagery was not ironic or cryptic, it was just breaking up an obvious narrative.

"It is also the first time in a long time I introduced representational motifs, and they were done in a way that was cut and paste, so they weren't in a specific setting."

Watkins says he bought a lot of printed ephemera and was fascinated by the way religious or superstitious images would cross over and become packaging or T-shirts or some other psychedelic phenomena.

Hanuman also appears as the central figure in Ambassador, this time on the rampage and with his face transformed into the front of a car.

The car is the Ambassador, the Indian version of the Morris Oxford, which has been in continuous production for more than 40 years.

Watkins says that is a nod to a Picasso sculpture which incorporated a toy car into the head of a figure.

To break up the show, Watkins has included some signs, painted like those he saw in the neighbouring village.

"I consider myself a sign painter. All artists paint signs. Some might be abstract, some might be realistic but that's what they do."

Exhibition

Who: Denys Watkins, Jungle Book

Where and when: Bath Street Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to Nov 27