CREATIVE ART
Let me be honest with you; I know nothing about art, but still call myself a self-taught artist. The word ‘art’ originated from the days our prehistoric ancestors started drawing those figures inside their caves (to kill their boredom, to escape a nagging wife or to make a mark of their existence ?! who knows…!) Either way, as far as my memory goes, I began my early scribbling when I was old enough to hold a piece of charcoal and mostly tried to copy the world around me with the available skills I possessed and still continue with that process, perhaps in a more refined way. Though I ventured into graphite, charcoal, water colors, oil paints, I feel I haven’t progressed much more than my great great grandfather who lived in one of those creepy caves and passed on his DNA ! Today, art has no value unless you know how to market it properly. That way, some people might call me unsuccessful in this field, but that wouldn’t stop me from creating more works of art. At least I need to leave behind my footprints to mark my existence in this world…
Oil Paint always remains as my favourite medium. Though it is a bit difficult to use and takes longer time to get cured, it lasts forever. Here’s an example of hyper-realistic oil work.
I would love to use Oil Paints for realistic portraits too. Kathakali dance of Kerala always fascinated me and never missed a chance to film those magnificent performances. I feel it is extremely difficult to translate their myriad moods and elaborate costumes on to canvas. I hope I have done justice to these great artists. Displayed below are two portraits. The first one is a close-up of Kalamandalam Balasubrahmanian, the great Kathakali maestro painted in the year 2002. Second One is Kalamandalam Vijayakumar [Champakkara Vijayan] in his Kathakali costumes, painted with incredibly fine details in 2014. It was really painstaking to paint more than 800 beads of his gold chain and to get the fine texture of his silk scarf.
That doesn’t keep me away from the basics of art where it all started from sketching. Charcoal and Graphite are equally important mediums for sketching and I have tried my hands on both. Here are some samples from my archives. Those expressions of the crows I found at the beach were captured on paper with charcoal pencils.
Graphite pencil still remains one of the basic tools of any illustrator. It looks simple but equally complex too. When I started sketching ‘DARPANA SUNDARI’, the wonderful sculpture of ‘the lady with a mirror’ from Belur temple, I never realized that it would be such a difficult task. But, it was worth the effort, I believe. Have a look…
Oh! Did I forget to mention Water Colors ? For me, it is still the most challenging medium and I still struggle with it after years of experimenting. Sometimes I feel water color has better ability to capture emotions compared to other mediums. Have a look at a few samples below :
Hampi, the monkey kingdom invokes several moods and I could spend hours, days or weeks looking into those magical frames there. This serene scene from Hampi used to drag me into it during my dreams and only way to escape from it was to paint it. Here is a humble attempt in water colour :
So were the creepy alleys of Varanasi. I used to get nightmares about those ruined doors, rusted chains and locks until it got transferred to paper.
Some of the beautiful photographs made by my dear friend Kaoru from Kyoto, Japan were my inspiration for a series of paintings on birds. Japanese white-eye birds [Mejiro メジロ or 目白] during the Cherry blossom [Sakura 桜] season in Japan.
Did I miss any other medium ?! Oh! Yeah! I could’ve attached some work of art using color pencils too. Here we go. By the way, Don’t blame me for the stink. Those sardines were rotten !! Ha Ha!
