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Despite his urban roots, Prabhakara Jimmy Quek has always been fascinated by the countryside. His earliest paintings are bird's-eye views of agricultural land, which have the functional look of modern design. Here and there the pattern of fields is broken by lines of canals, roads or a meandering river. Tranquility, 1987 (Collection: Shell Companies in Singapore), is an example of such panoramic vistas of patchwork fields and high horizons-clean and straight-forward, lucid and informative.
Prabhakara's early enthusiasm for art was encouraged by Tan Seng Yong, his art teacher at Dunman Government Chinese Middle School, who taught him Chinese painting, calligraphy, watercolors and oil painting, and took him to exhibitions. A minor impediment caused by a childhood bout with polio was also a factor in fostering his interest in the relatively sedentary occupation of painting. On leaving school in 1973, he enrolled in the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts where he received lessons from Si Xiangtuo, Chen Chong Swee and Lim Yew Kuan, among others. He left after only a year, persuaded by his father to take a course in business studies at the Ngee Ann Technical College, where he was enrolled from 1974 to 1977. He then worked for six years as administrative officer, then accounts executive, and finally manager in a design company where his artistic flair proved in graphic and three-dimensional design projects.
In 1985 Prabhakara gave up all business involvement in order to concentrate on painting, starting with a refresher course at St Patrick's School of Art (now known as La Salle College of the Arts). "Steffan Neumann, a Belgian artist lecturing there, taught me the color theory which I then began applying in my painting. But I left after two year, as I soon picked up what I wanted to learn and had my own ideas about art, I had my first solo exhibition in 1987.
Eager to be involved in the most avant-garde in art, Prabhakara developed an image of landscape in which nature is portrayed in all its pristine wildness, very different from his lucid and informative aerial views of nature, tamed and ordered by the human hand. Implicit in these painting is the notion of the sublime in nature, where the natural world is portrayed as picturesque and beautiful on the one hand, and terrifying and powerful on the other. Prabhakara's focus on nature's abstract elements, never-stable and ever-changing, led him to an art in which the recognizable object ultimately disappears. He achieved this by combining the techniques he had learned with his enthusiasm for American Expressionism, taking risks with his material to create a powerful physical sense of the outdoors and of the atmosphere and coastline, the winds and rainstorms. The best known from this series are Beginning to Rejoice and Celebrating with Nature, 1992 (Collection: Raffles City Pte Ltd, displayed in the foyer of the Westin Stamford), monumental vistas painted with a sweeping brush and dramatic colors to convey the artist's profound feeling for the mysteries of nature and immensity of the universe.
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