Collie Art Prize 2020: I was a finalist with a self-portrait I painted after my father’s death 2 years ago
A Many Splendoured Thing, Acrylic on Canvas 2020 by Carl Gopalkrishnan
Not many people saw this painting, because Covid-19 hit hard as this exhibition just got started. I was short-listed for the Collie Art Prize with this work, but they had to close down early for the lockdown. I hope it gets a longer viewing because it is my spiritual diary during these times.
2020 was so disturbing and disorienting for us all. We spent so much time online, but off our game, images, thoughts and emotions emerging out of a vortex of unknowns. I felt oddly prepared for this after 2 years emerging from grieving my father who died in February 2018. It was a difficult time because I underestimated his role in my life. I have reflected a lot about fathers and sons and the performances we enact for each other. I read a lot of Aeschylus, re-reading the Oresteia for the intensity of the characters and mythic emotions around family and death. Aeschylus’ Furies, towards the end of the play, chasing Orestes, was a description of my inner life very well. This is a spiritual painting, in the sense that my God is personal, not doctrinal.
There is a wide, empty stillness in it that I don’t always embrace. Symbols of my faith, and all my cultures and heritages are mixed up. Patterns of found fabric and the nuns, my former Catholic faith that I left behind as I embraced all faiths. Dad was an Indian in the Brahmin Hindu tradition. I shaved my head for his funeral and played a big role in a performance directed by a Hindu priest I’d never met before. That was important but it was surreal and painful and frightening. I felt like my own emotions, my culturally mixed up identities, never got to grieve. So this painting is many funeral rites I didn’t get to express during the funeral which was in the traditional Hindu burial rites.
It’s about masks falling off, and lids dropping off boxes, and all my mistakes and lost opportunities escaping like the Furies. In the story I am performing the Christian funeral, and reincarnating my Chinese heritage through my mother, while acknowledging the relationships that died as a result of years of doctrine. Crime scene outlines memorialize the lost loves of my life.
In the paintings from the Bildungsroman series I try to reference an era of art history or artist who has influenced this period of my life. In this painting I reached out to the spirit of the artist Francis Bacon as I become his nude diving back into God in the far distance. Always, every element is submerging and dissolving back into the vortex of Creation, of ideation, the Hindu causal plan or God - waiting to be reborn - like my own soul. Love remains, and Love is a many splendoured thing.
