Excerpts from "Conversation with a painter" published in TEMENOS

A review journal devoted to the arts of the imagination, published from London.

……..the patina of deep feeling and personal sentiment is a must for the ambitious and perforce, rather overconfident modernist. The inner chemistry that fructified the work of the traditional artists was a little otherwise, and so no end to life-giving celebration….Certainly, art when it brushes aside the common subjecthood and opts for sheer inventiveness and experiment, tends to become self destructive. Art, unlike technology is not an instrumentality alone.

" Even as we try, we cannot explain away and empty life of its mystery. Life is a complex of fact and fancy, logic and meaning; and but of course, art pierces life where it is most sensitive. But yet of that mystery something remains to tantalize and silence us. Yes, khosa has been trying to touch this mystery's hidden center through the purity of his images.….khosa's painted parables seize a portion of the universal to become art;……Art like this transports us; there is some double vision here so that we may be able to perceive the visible and also invade the invisible;……..

This metaphysical realism, if that is what the painter practices, is completely free of the pointlessly fantastical. A dream it is, but a believable one, one which the sage viewer's mind accepts willingly,……

Yes, art such as the painter has been lately pursuing is a yearning for the miraculous. It is hope to transmit in our bones the wonder of the seemingly impossible….There is a spectral quality to the painter's images. But such supernaturalism, if we may dub it that at a pinch, easily comes to one who is not overpowered by a world of muchness, by the glare of the insistent present moment. Being contemplative, khosa's is not a world of darker shadows; a paradisical inscape it is, reserved as it were for the spirit to glide in.

Khosa is one among those who help art return to its primary duties……Most often one is merely 'outside' experience - things happen to one. One is ' inside' when one ponders over all experience, over the very stuff of life, and to that extent becomes an instrument of truth. At this point the duo of 'outside-inside' becomes redundant.

Only the soul-ruled body possesses a knowledge of the vital truth, of the earth's ever burgeoning green. Only so can we extend the hand of mercy over those who lie in the line of shadows. Yes, it lies within us to turn the angle of the sun, so that it brings the warm curative balm of compassion on the prone.