Vanishing Point, 2009
Vanishing Point:
Donald Fels and South Indian Billboard painters
This exhibition is the fruit of a five-year collaboration between artist Donald Fels and billboard painters in South India. Fels went to South India on a Fulbright Fellowship with the idea of painting large the history and legacy of Vasco da Gama’s arrival there in 1498. Da Gama’s voyage from Portugal is widely credited as having ushered in the age of global trade. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, also sailing to India, was convinced he had arrived there and named the inhabitants “Indians”. Both men were intent on arriving at India’s Malabar Coast because it produced the only black pepper in the world, a highly valuable commodity in Europe in the 15th century.
Da Gama arrived in Cochin to load the cargo of peppercorns; Fels went there to paint about this historic event and its changing meaning over the centuries. Among much else, Da Gama’s arrival lead directly to the colonialization of Asia. Fels’ intention was to design paintings in collaboration with billboard painters who would paint them. Fels was anxious to have the painters’ ideas about da Gama’s legacy inform the paintings themselves.
It took Fels several months to locate any painters, because billboards in India are now almost entirely printed rather than painted. He finally met up with Surya Noufal, a young former billboard painter and they began working together. Soon they were joined by other ex-billboard painters, and began producing paintings together in a 300 year old former pepper warehouse. Billboards in India were traditionally painted with oil enamel on metal sheeting, so this became the way of working in the warehouse.
The ‘Vasco paintings’ that they completed became a touring exhibition organized by the Tacoma Art Museum. The painters then invited Fels to return to India twice more to work with them. The paintings on exhibition in Bellevue are from their most recent collaboration in 2008. Fels’s father had been a WWII pilot over ‘the Hump’- the Himalaya mountains, flying over the mountains to China and back from his base in India. Fels decided to do a series of paintings about his father as a pilot there. While the painters were painting, Fels often photographed them and they all decided it would be interesting to start another group of paintings based on these at-work photographs. As they painted those paintings, Fels once again photographed the painters at work, once again those photographs became the basis of new paintings. In this way, the paintings became more and more abstract.
Over thirty years practice as an artist Fels has continued to paint, write and sculpt. He also has collaborated broadly with other artists, with scientists, poets, geographers, composers, architects, actors and many others. He treasures these interactions for the improvisational richness that the process introduces. Fraught with risk and difficulty, working collaboratively is surely not for everyone, and it is definitely not the way that the Indian billboard painters were accustomed to working. As commercial painters they were used to being hired to paint imagery exactly as given them. But after several years of work together, the painters and Fels have developed a rapport that has pushed their collective boundaries. It is in this spirit that these paintings are offered for view in the gallery at Bellevue College.