Adventures of a Salesman in Art World – Part 8

Through this series ‘Adventures of a salesman in art world’, Mr Chandrashekhar Ojha, former DGM Marketing of Camlin continues to share his insightful memories. Throughout his career spread across four decades, he gathered a wealth of insights about the art world through his interactions with artists and art lovers. In this eighth part, he shares his experiences of serving clients in and beyond his territory in Rajasthan, as well as the interesting insights he developed on problems like paint cracking in oil paintings.

Part 8 – ‘Rajasthan & Beyond’

One more experiment of Camlin in 1991 gave a new beautiful twist to my career. Company decided to create an industry-first specialized sales promotion team and I was fortunate to be drafted for it. In fact, I was one of only two SRs selected for this 13-member elite all India team. It was launched in a meeting in Mumbai in January 1991. In this meeting we met a new person in HO Sales & Marketing team, Mr R G Kasbekar, who steered this team and changed Camlin in many ways, during his two stints. My area of operation as an SPO was Rajasthan and Western UP, including Gwalior and present-day Uttarakhand.

To cover the vast area and attend a couple of monthly meetings, my tour would start in the first week and continue till the end of the month. From Delhi I would either continue on the Meerut – Dehradun belt or take Agra-Jhansi one, and from there return to cover few towns of Rajasthan before returning home by the end of the month. Travelling such crazy routes with a 28” suitcase, a briefcase full of samples a Milton water bottle & my constant companion books, was not always a fun, but mostly was.

I was very excited to visit Meerut as it was supposed to be a big centre for colour sales due to large number of commercial artists and private art schools, like Chaman and Swaroop. The town was famous for art, publishing business and musical instrument manufacturing. It was also an important military station. However, the worst thing about Meerut was very expensive town. But the anaesthesia of excitement kept me going on.

On my very first bus trip from Meerut to Dehradun, I found myself sitting next to a Sikh gentleman. During the conversation I learnt that he was a musician and was running a store of musical instruments and recorded music in Dehradun. He helped me a lot with local contacts and we became friends forever. Mr Ajeet Singh had also worked as music teacher in Doon and Woodstock schools and used to travel widely for his concerts. Every time when I went to Dehradun and when he came to Delhi or Mumbai, we used to meet and had long conversations. He was not keeping well of-late and after the lockdown he passed away. I lost a great friend and a 30 years long association came to an end.

Visiting famous schools of Dehradun and Mussorie, as well as institutions like different units of Survey of India, ONGC, Petroleum Institute, IFRI etc. and serving them was a pleasure. Similarly visiting research institutes on Veterinary science and Avians in Bareilly or Scindia and Scindia Girls school in Gwalior etc. were the few high points of my SPO days. In Agra I got to meet many artists and art institutes like Agra College, Dayalbaug, BDJ College etc. And something that happened during these visits, gave me a life-long mission, to propagate the use of right art material, at the right time and in right manner for better paintings.

In one of the art colleges one of the professors showed me his painting with a brown tree in focus, which was full of cracks and sarcastically said, “Only Camel oil colours can produce such effects.” I had no answer to it then but it was troubling me and I badly wanted to find it. While discussing Artist Oil Colours with another artist later, he asked about the added advantage of using AOC if they are already using SOC, Canvas and Turpentine of Camel. I was shocked as he mentioned Turpentine instead of Linseed oil as medium of oil painting, and asked the reason behind. He said that they were advised by their teachers in college to do so, which was further shocking. This also explained the cracks in the painted tree and overall lack-lustre looks of the paintings in general.

On further enquiry what I found was pretty interesting. The students had created paintings for submission during final exam. They had used cheap linseed oil from paint shop containing soluble waxes, to save on cost. The lab-assistant had collected the touch-dried paintings and kept them in a heap, one over another. As a result, they got stuck to each other. Hence, the professor advised them to use turpentine for submission paintings to avoid such accidents in future. But it turned into a communication faux-pas and generations of artist passed out with the wrong SOP and became teachers passing it further, till it became a sacred rule.

As pigments come from different sources and have different nature, they behave differently and hence must be handled carefully to avoid accidents. Similarly, mediums are greatly responsible for the look and life of the paintings and hence must be selected and used carefully. I’ve learnt that almost all the art colleges have done away with an important theory subject called Materials and Methods, which used to deal with these issues. As a result, most students ignore all the time-tested rules of materials and methods, focus only on visual aspect of painting, resulting in many issues with the paintings.

I mentioned this to Mrs Rajani Dandekar (Vahini) and humbly requested her to create a video with demo by some senior artist to communicate and profess the use of right material in right manner, but it was brushed away. According to her it must be localized North issue as the faculty members of JJ and other institutes elsewhere were quite competent. I had no option but to withdraw. However, sometime later she magnanimously confessed that I was right as she found the similar issues everywhere also. So with her help and inputs from Camlin R&D and the LKA restorer Mr Manjeet Debashish, I created a presentation titled, “Know Your Materials” and started addressing students in art colleges, which continued till my last day with the company in one form or another, and I think some of my colleagues would carry on in future too.

Chandrashekhar Ojha