Masses and masses of people, their backs actually. The women with their hair braided and adorned with flowers and trinkets, and the men standing regal in their humble turbans. But they have one thing in common, they carry weights on their heads, be it baskets piled with watermelons or vegetables, stacks of bricks, water pots, a mound of sand, tools for trade… Sophie Jo’s current series of paintings are about hard working rural Indian peasants and their urban counterparts. Many of her works are intriguingly named, such as ‘The Madras Carriers’. “These paintings are about what my eyes retain and interpret of India,” she says.
Sophie Jo, who has been living in Chennai for the last four years, is no stranger to villages. Growing up in a French city, a young Sophie would perhaps have had no inkling of the rural charms she was about to encounter.
Post marriage, she has been travelling round the globe, courtesy her husband’s job with a multinational firm. And in the process, she has walked through coffee fields in Brazil, rice fields in Thailand, and flower gardens in Denmark, and holds a soft corner for the rural peasant. But despite this introduction to rural women, the Indian village women amaze her no end. Sophie has been travelling the countryside in India, from up north in villages in Rajasthan to down south in villages around Chennai.
She voices, “These people work hard — the women in particular. The sun is always in their face, and to use a cliché, they toil from dawn to dusk. And yet they retain their dignity, and their smiles. They continue to decorate themselves, and are not cowed down by the weight on their heads, both literally and virtually.” So Sophie’s canvasses celebrate the dignity of the labourer.
A former illustrator, Sophie decided to become an artist about 10 years back, when she and her husband were living in Brazil. This is perhaps what makes her give stress to lines and outlines, and the colours in her canvasses never really flow into one another. Whatever mixing of colour there is, it happens beforehand, on her palette. She doesn’t apply the paint straight from a tube, but mixes it up before applying it on to the canvass. “Rarely do I change a colour at the end of the process,” she says. I hope my colours present the gifts that nature gives us from its colours, its volumes, its contrasts, its organisation, its subtlety and positivism, without which we would never forget the constraints we encounter,” she hopes.
Sophie expresses a preoccupation with the suffering she sees in so many around her. “I hope my children would have their eyes wide open to what is surrounding them, and that we as parents may have their eye on them,” she says. This sense of empathy is what she tries to communicate in her paintings.
Decidedly, her paintings are people centric. In fact, some of her canvasses have hundreds of people in them. Her painting ‘Indian Traffic - 1’, for instance has over five hundred people stacked with each person brushing the next person. There really are too many of us Indians, these paintings remind you. But Sophie doesn’t look at it as negative, but rather as an incredulity.
Sophie’s impressions of hardworking country folk have found takers in many countries. Her luminescent profile of a Rajasthani woman complete with scores of bangles lined from shoulder to wrist and walking in the harsh glare of the sun even while balancing a huge pot on her head, has found a patron in Sweden, while her impression of a Brazilian peasant has found a home in Japan. Not to mention the magnificent impact that ‘Indian Traffic’ has had around the world. In a sense, she is facilitating an informal, global understanding.
