Artists’ Representations of the Human Body: Four Poems

Four Poems by Jayanta Mahapatra The Portrait This evening, its face rigid as though it had had a stroke. A large owl burrows deep into its steamy air, our souls hold the soft darkness when each one of us becomes an invalid turned stiffly to his bed. We remain sitting together, Human body is considered to be one of the most beautiful and difficult subject to draw and paint in the art world. Artists spend years honing the art of representing them. Some go for contemporary style, some academic, abstract, representational or sculptural. Whatever type of style it may be, they all spend a lot of time studying the anatomy and forms of the body. All this might not be too evident, but it definitely goes in the mind of the artist. The marvels of human body endlessly inspire engineers and scientists to innovate in their respective fields.

When studying in Florence, I studied with a senior artist who had spent 7 years just studying anatomy with a maestro in Venice. That is the obsession and awe of an artist for creating beautiful artwork of human body. In the ateliers all over the world, many years are spent just training the eye to paint the nude models from life. Initially drawing/painting a figure from life is intimidating but then you start appreciating the nuances and beauty of this universe’s most complicated creation. The best part is, all bodies are beautiful in the eye of an artist. Each body has its own story to tell and it is depicted in the most bizarre and traditional ways in art from centuries.

Below are a few examples of

Academic Style – Michelangelo Buonarroti( 1475- 1564) – He was considered to be a master in portraying human figure. He used to first examine the corpses in the convent of Santo Spirito in Florence when he was in his late teens.
In the figure here you can see how he works in a structural way finding the form in each part of the body and sculpting it using the red chalk. The figure almost breathes like a sculpture.

“Madonna and the child” is one the famous topics depicted by many artists from 14th to 20th centuries. One of my favourite depictions is below

Pable Picasso
This piece of Picasso is from his “Blue period” when he completely abandoned realism. The way he has painted this piece in blue and with a closed gesture brings to mind a sense of despair. Although the man is sad and is poor, yet his inner mind is trying to feel some kind of hope through his music, which holds very dearly.

Aleah Chapin
This piece by Chapin evokes the scream from one’s soul. With the way she has depicted the inside of her mouth and the gesture calls for a woman, who is tired of everything and just want to let everything out

I really like the way she invokes women emotions through her paintings. As I remember from one of the podcast I heard, the first painting is of a breast cancer survivor.

Jennifer Ann Saville
She is a contemporary British painter known for her large-scale painted depictions of nudes. Her work represents the actuality of real bodies.

Fernando Botero
He was a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor who had a signature style known as “ Boterismo”, depicts people and figures in large exaggerated volume. Not to my liking, but definitely art has been pushing boundaries and this is yet another example of how bodies can be used to make a point in this world.

Pan Xunqin, China ( 1906 – 1986)
Another example of self-expression in art. incapable of getting any farther. Only the footfall of someone approaching from the murdered land. Only the infinite kingdom when you can’t stop anyone from a simple pain. Does a raped sixteen-year-old girl build a hymn of the world where living is a flamboyant metaphor? Just this evening, blacked like he yin half of the symbol where death can go on proclaiming its vanity. Walls of our world, where are you? The evening takes whatever comes drifting in. Aimless, I prowl through reports about justice. All I have is a face, rigid and helpless as though it had a stroke. Romance of Her Hand The little girl’s hand is made of darkness How will I hold it? The streetlamps hang like decapitated heads Blood opens that terrible door between us The wide mouth of the country is clamped in pain where its body writhes on its bed of nails This little girl has just her raped body for me to reach her The weight of my guilt is unable to overcome my resistance to hug her. Mask of Longing The hospital ward is dying of an unknown thirst. A time when even oxygen seems to hiss cruelly into the still holes of Mariam’s nose. And all words of consolation merely graze in the land of their own silence. In those crumpled eyes of hers the light of death goes on gathering shadows. And I feel I’m late with my life. An agony with twenty feet throbs on. Truth holds toward her an invisible mask for her to wear, as a land haunted by the cries of women made hostages by history sinks into the silent vengeance of ruin. Scream A scream never ends. It tries to be kind, but our hatred keeps coming between us. The night stands like a conqueror over it, the spear of darkness held in her hands, the centre of everything. Like a dark stubborn child, the scream. Like its mother, cold, aloof. It is inside my head all the time, as days and shadows pass by, till it wakens me to a different reality. till it dislikes me for its throne’s sake. Ashes of sobs, the baying of hounds, the snarling jaws of ceremony, the vomit of iron. A scream tests warm, small innocences, divests the long moments of its manhood. Wild as the Dance, the Winds and the Flood, its deep streets are mortared with bone and blood. Blindfold your scream again, sweet Mariam, with the quick blood flowing down your seven-year thighs. Poems excerpted with permission from Collected Poems by Jayanta Mahapatra, published by Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2018. Jayanta Mahapatra (1928) is a bilingual poet and has published over 40 volumes of poetry in English and Odia, translations, short stories, essays, and memoirs, and has been featured in numerous anthologies. In the late seventies, he founded and edited Chandrabhaga, a literary magazine dedicated to Indian writing. The first Indian poet writing in English to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1982, he is also the recipient of numerous awards and honours, such as, the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award for Poetry in 1975, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize from The Sewanee Review, the SAARC Literary Award, and the Padma Sri by the President of India in 2009, which he returned in 2015 as a mark of protest against the growing ‘moral asymmetry’ in the country. In 2017, he was awarded the Kanhaiyalal Lifetime Poetry Award at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He currently lives in Cuttack, Orissa.