Mythology and the Visual Arts

Speaker: Devdutt Patnaik

February 18, 1999 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

The language of symbols addresses the unconscious and finds the translation in myths. Myths, like symbols, attempt to explain what the mind cannot comprehend and the tongue cannot express. When prose is insufficient to capture a thought, a feeling, an emotion, the artist turns to poetry, and when poetry fails, he turns to the visual arts. The visual vocabulary is a complex one based on the grammar of symbols. Every line, every curve, every colour has something to say.

Dr. Devdutt Patnaik, who graduated in medicine, is a mythologist by passion and topped the Mumbai University course in Comparative Mythology.