Holle R B

Holle was born in the remote village of kasari in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, formerly Bombay. For most westerners predominant images of India are of overcrowding—teeming streets, swarming tenements, trains and buses spilling over with passengers. But India is a large country, and the rural areas, where most of the population live, can strike the traveller as strangely empty. Outside Holle’s native village were the fields cultivated by the villagers and then the comparatively empty spaces of the countryside. These spaces made a deep impression on Holle as a child—these and the more distant spaces of the heavens, whose constellations figure in his paintings.
At the village school he encountered books in his mother tongue of Marathi and also began to draw and paint. At this stage he was deeply immersed in village culture, and he soon helped to paint religious scenes on the walls of the local temple. An important local icon is the white bullock, the centre of an annual festival and an important motif in religious art, and these duly appeared in his early work.
His subsequent life and career have taken him far from his native village: first to art schools in Nasik and Pune (formerly Poona), then, almost inevitably, to Mumbai. There he attended the famous and historic school of art at which Rudyard Kipling’s father was once a professor. Now he lives with his wife and son in a township not strictly within the city limits but essentially part of this huge and rapidly growing city crowded onto a narrow peninsula. “I long for open spaces,” he told me, “but I spend most of my life within four walls.” It is true that in Mumbai one is never far from the ocean, and the beach is only a few kilometers from his home: on a little table in his sitting-room are pebbles sculpted by the waves and other objects found on his walks. But in speaking to him it becomes clear that he is acutely conscious of his physical separation from the land in which he grew up and in which his imagination was formed.
Happily, however, he has discovered a way of returning, spiritually and creatively, to that lost world, and it is in his work that he finds the spaces that daily life does not easily provide. His paintings bring together the passions of his life: the rhythms of nature and music (he is deeply interested in Indian classical music), and above all the spaces of landscape and skyscape. Inside the mature artist is the village boy who looked at the fields and landscapes and the constellations of the heavens and was filled with excitement and awe at the pulsing life of their spaces.

Holle R B's Art Corner