Artist CF John is not given to flourishes. He does not need them because in his work, you see the distillation of all of life. Not its impulses. Raw gashes. Or its over stated drama. What you see is balance. Stillness. Life evenly poised between the tangible and the invisible. Swathes of peace. Introspective protagonists revelling in rich inner lives. John’s work does not chatter. It calms the chatter in our heads. His work is not a stimulus. It is meditation. Not a journey but a feeling of coming home. It does not say,”here I am!” It says,”I am. And its enough.” He says,”I define myself in a state of connectedness, a sort of readiness for dissolution of the self in timelessness. Art  is meditation and a prayer for me.”

And through this prayer, his works soar above the ‘I’  and its limiting affectations to acquire a larger sense of self.

In the few times, I have met John, I have been struck by just how naturally reclusive he is. His house is far removed from the city. You will never see him courting fame at the wine and cheese art events. He does not ever hold court. He has conversations. In measured, well-chosen words. And if you needed to describe his life in two words, they would be containment and contentment.

He pares everything down to essentials. Be it in life or in art. And he agrees, “Eliminating everything, emotions, desires to reach the basics interests me. I choose rather soft, subdued and neutral colors to add to the sense of dreamy interiorisation. The colors are brushed gently into the canvas erasing any kind of articulation. Even the images are minimalistic and blend easily in the becalming background. I always strive to arrive at a balance of planes, of geometrical lines and shapes, as well as of the rational and emotional in human existence. Even the emotions that are dynamic also find stillness and silence within.”

He adds, “For me, stillness is dynamic. Whatever is happening happens around this stillness. Every movement comes from stillness and enters back into it.”

He also has a deep, organic connection with Nature. Because he believes, it mirrors who we are. He explains,”After many years of working on various  installation projects, I stepped into a different phase of life. I spent nearly two years involving myself in agriculture. Though I had done many art projects pertaining to environmental concerns, I wanted to know how such issues unfold in real life in terms of bio-diversity, water harvesting… and how a life system operates in a particular terrain. It was also a voyage of exploration into myself.  What we see in the land is also nurtured (or betrayed) within.”

This break, he says was a period of incubation, “My involvement in agriculture brought within me many new thoughts. I started getting drawn into interventions in real life situations and it was difficult and agonising, different from when we bring these subjects to art. What you grow in a piece of land is ‘short-lived’ unlike art on canvas but it is the vital spring of life.”

Nature is simple but the simplicity comes from processes far more complex than what the mind can unravel or the eye can observe and in CF John’s works, you see the here and the now and the fruition that he has reached after a long journey of seeding, harvesting, both within and without. “Yet, the art is just about my own joy,” he says. As you can see, everything is simple in his world. Always.

Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight. (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870) . More on Story Wallahs.  Also check other books by Unboxed Writers in our Store.