Self reflections

MF Husain’s self-portrait

Pick up your phone. Switch on the camera function. Turn the screen on reverse mode so that it faces you, and just click. That's it. That's all it takes to embody the selfie generation that we are part of today. But before we reached this point in technological advancement, master painters would spend laborious hours staring at their reflection in the mirror and expressing their own selves on a canvas for self-portraits. The trend goes as far back as 1512 in the West, when Leonardo Da Vinci created a vision of himself in a piece titled Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk. But it caught on much later in India, in the 20th century, since our art culture was centred more on religiosity and rituals before that, says Roshini Vadehra, director of Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, who has now started an Instagram series that showcases the self-portraits of master Indian painters.

Atul Dodiya's Baazigar-themed self-portrait

It includes a piece by Atul Dodiya where he's painted himself in the manner of Shah Rukh Khan holding a revolver in the iconic Baazigar poster, with images of two of his favourite artists - Bhupen Khakhar and David Hickney - reflected in his sunglasses. There's one of MF Husain, where the legend is painting one of his characteristic horses, which makes it an Inception-kind-of work. "Some address the issue with humour, while others take a melancholic angle," Vadehra says. Either way, the point is that if we are to compare phone selfies and artistic self-portraits, the former is as easy as opening a packet of peanuts and popping one in your mouth, while the latter is like cooking a buffet meal single-handedly for over 100 people.

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