Kate Dineen

Kate Dineen may live in W10 but her craft extends back through generations of stonemasons and artisans of Rajasthan. Nancy Alsop relates her colourful tale

Above: kate Dineen photograph by Richard Ivey

“The first time I went to India  – I was 17 or 18 – I met a minister on the train. She was wearing a crisp white sari and had this amazing grey hair. She gave me the address of the ex-prime minister of Udaipur and wrote a note to him saying ‘Please look after Kate’”. The Kate in question is artist Kate Dineen, now ensconsed in W10, recalling her first foray to India and the naissance of a lifelong passion for the country.
Somehow, despite the fact that we’re firmly in west London, the mental leap to the East requires no dexterous feat of the imagination; we’re surrounded by her vivid sculptures, literally blocks of pigmented colour, in every brilliant hue, as well as beautiful, vibrant patchwork fabrics draped over her workspace. Kate shares a house with sculptor Paul Vanstone and their home is colourful and full of their own work.
Following up her new acquaintance’s suggestion, she arrived at the ex-PM’s residence at 5.30am, straight from her overnight train and dressed in khakis. Immediately, she was welcomed into the fold, shown to her room and a few hours later would find herself togged up in traditional Rajasthani dress – a skirt-and-a-half and a bodice – and bangles (“My western arms were bigger than theirs, so half of the brass bangles broke – so embarrassing!”). Then there was singing and dancing with the women of the house and – even more surreally – a baby covered in black kohl, to ward off the evil eye; later, the men took her to meet the former prime minister. “Where else in the world would that happen? Imagine going from the train to meet Gordon Brown and be put up at Number 10.”
But for Dineen, this extraordinary episode was just the beginning of an epic and intermittent adventure spanning years, which would ultimately inform her creative oeuvre. Finding the draw of the country “like a drug”, she kept going back, almost exclusively alone and always armed with her sketchbook. “I loved and hated it,” she recalls. “When you go as a tourist, you meet touts, who’re not the best version of humanity.” She persevered, driven latterly not only by a fascination for the country, but also by artistic inquisitiveness.
She had come across the ancient (though declining) art of araash, traditional Indian fresco painting which uses marble dust, limestone, cement and colour pigment, and was moved to seek out an apprenticeship in what she would discover was a “bloody stupidly labour intensive” process. Via the British Council, she tracked down Gyarsilal Varma, an araash expert from a caste of stonemasons.
“He started when he was four, working for the Maharaja. What sold it to me was seeing these long white corridors with a strip of black running along them. It was so beautiful and it only gets better with time. The day I found Gyasilal, he’d done this traditional painting of an elephant, using the technique. I thought, ‘That’s my man!’”
There was, however, still some convincing to do; araash (meaning ‘reflection’) is an art whose secrets stray neither from its caste, nor from the male line, passed down from father to son. Then there was the fact that while he spoke no English she had mastered only rough Hindi.
But while he might have been nonplussed to start with, Dineen doggedly watched and learned, having obtained a Commonwealth/ British Council scholarship to study with him; for the next two and a half years she lived solidly in Rajasthan, and for the ensuing 13, made it her business to be there at least a few months of the year, honing her craft and interviewing him through an interpreter. “My conversations with Gyarsilal were like a window onto a world that doesn’t exist any more. He spoke in Hindi while his nephew translated. I’d ask a question and he’d answer for five minutes – then I’d get a translation of two seconds.” Fortunately, a friend loyally transcribed the tapes.
Eventually, she won Gyasilal’s seal of approval; he bestowed upon her a set of tools that had been used by his father. “It was a pretty cosmic moment,” she recalls. “I saw him one month before he died. He was a pretty cool customer but it felt different that time – perhaps he knew he wasn’t well. He gave me these amazing crystal tools.” Touchingly, his picture hangs in her studio, her tribute to the mentor whose guidance was her ticket to becoming the only woman in the world to have mastered araash.
His tools would also be her ticket out of a sticky situation years later. Having learned from the master this incredibly laborious art (she’s regularly in her studio till 2 am – grinding brick dust, sand and lime with water, over which layers of marble dust, lime and pigment are then spread), she was invited to work with Bijoy Jayn, the architect at the helm of Studio Mumbai, on a “big, poncy” restaurant in the city. Jayn had hired her on the basis of her mastery of the technique combined with her use of vivid colour (traditionally, araash is executed in earthy colours), but alongside had recruited some guys from Jaipur to help.
“They’d never left Jaipur – they’d never seen the sea before – you might as well have sent them to Oz. They were awkward buggers and they weren’t doing the process the way it’s meant to be done. I had to say: ‘That’s not how you do it.’” They thought: ‘What do you know – you’re white and female.’” She showed them the agate tools that Gyarsilal had given her; after that, she was totally accepted. “The women ground the colour – they do all the dogsbody stuff. It was like a cottage industry. We had a craik. They thought it was hilarious – me wearing my plastic sack every day – they thought I was a freak. It felt like it had come full circle – me learning from Gyasilal and then taking my version back.”
For the past two years, Dineen has been working on her first exhibition in London for four years (in between she has exhibited in New York, Zurich and Geneva). Colourwallah marks a change in her work, from her previous colour fields, which were seamlessly perfect and so large that she had to employ six men to move them to smaller scale, individual pieces. “I wanted shape and narrative.” The amoeba-like shapes are pleasingly simplistic but underneath their uncomplicated form they’re layered like skin with gratifying imperfections and bruises, knocked into them through exposure to extremes of temperature and water soaking.
These will be exhibited alongside her patchworks, inspired by a woman’s washing hanging out in the monsoon rain in Mumbai that Dineen spied from a cab: “Poor driver, I asked him to cut across four lanes of traffic – cows and everything – so I could go and have look. I bought the fabric from her. Everyone laughed at me, because to them it was a dirty old cloth but to me – well, Marni eat your heart out.”
But while Dineen is not in her studio into the wee hours or getting inspired in India, you’ll find her on Golborne Road, just a short stroll from her house. “I like this end of Portobello, though I am horrified at the plans to get rid of the market stalls and make it into a new Sloane Street. People seem to want to make the whole of London into some kind of homogenous shopping zone. But Golborne Road I love. It’s the mixed-up-ness of it all that appeals. It has such character.” Quite. And just the same can be said of the artist herself.  l

Colourwallah is at the Robert Sandelson Gallery, 5 Cork Street W1 until 11 January