Art is divine inspiration. I was inspired by art from my childhood. A part of my childhood days was spent at Thiruvananthapuram. It was an energising experience in the lap of nature, a child's unconscious rendezvous with the lush grandeur of nature. Sensing my artistic Inclinations, my father bought me a box of watercolours. It was as if I was drawn into the corridors of a fairy tale.
Various thoughts used to crisscross my mind and I used to associate them with colours and images. I felt that art is the basic constituent element of all human knowledge and you come to terms with it resorting to your own storehouse of images. These images are instinct bound and spontaneously flash in your inward eye.
The child generally has a periscopic vision. He absorbs all visuals in a horizontal plane and then he views them conveniently. The essential stays in his mind and what is beyond is not retained. My early drawings were just reflecting an emotion or conveying an information. I was satisfied with them and so were my parents. They must have treated my early dabblings with appreciation and the artist in me must have grown with confidence.
I got enrolled in the Government College of Arts & Crafts, Poonamalee High Road. Here, I learnt in an orthodox way, the potentiality of painting. The following aspects of painting, that I was not aware of on a scientific plane, became evident to me; the picture space, spatial arrangement, border, mass and line, texture, colour, tone aspects, recession, composition, representation, devices for suggesting different depths, movements, impressions and the general principles of creating optical illusions etc.
I also got acquainted with different schools of painting. I read excerpts from Pliny the elder giving a slow, unwinding account of the materials and technique of painting as applied in the European Art. I read about how there should be a predominant image and how objects of remembrance and worship play a great part in moulding the concept of painting. Later in the translations of Vishnu Dharmottaram, a Sanskrit work of VI century A.D., on art and painting, I read similar expositions and was convinced that there was a universality about painting in its basics and also in the imagery. I learnt that an artist recasts, adjusts and continues to paint again and again; until he arrives at the conception he wants. I was now convinced that the exercise of drawing and painting was a laboratory for aesthetic experiment.
It was a chance visit to a glazier and picture framer's shop that became the starting point for my initiation into the finer aspects of Tanjore paintings. It was so elevating, energising and inspiring that I wanted to get myself initiated into it. I saw a procession of Tanjore paintings in various households, chatrams and kalyana mandapams. As I watched them with avid interest, I found that the main image was in the centre of the picture and all the characters addressed themselves to it. It seemed like the ageless Indian society trying to incarnate itself in the Tanjore painting. Studying and learning about other patterns of Indian painting, I was convinced that variety was an illusion and all Indian painting systems were inextricably linked and their unity was easy to find and identify. I had always remained a child viewing with awe before the passing parade of the Indian mythology, the Dasavatara which was allegorical, Rama and Krishna being the symbols of India's hoary past.
Whenever I see a Tanjore painting my heart vibrates with emotions. A framed Tanjore painting beckoned me to a phase of life that was part of my being. my convictions, my way of life and my relevance to the culture and heritage of India that have descended down the times.
Art is the nectar of life. It flows rich and full in the veins of human beings. It has given mankind, a distinct identification. We are the creator's bristles endowed with the ability and facility to recreate. His creations form a platform over which we mirror our sense of appreciation.
Sound was the first divine gift man adopted for his utility. From a shout, a wail or a moan to a rhythmic system of music can be verily called an astonishing achievement of the human vocal chord. But in music, the human being was one of the many imitators in the living world. The birds were singing, the animals were expressing sounds in various decibels. The wind was creating a sensual passage through sound. Man simply emulated the Nature.
Drawing and painting are related to a first-hand reproduction or imitation that is not directly dependant upon nature for its development. In the course of evolution, the quadruped mammal became a biped man and then he discovered his hands and its various uses. The hands can be called the parents of civilization and drawing can be called the first-born of the hands.
Drawing and painting are the first two steps of civilization. Drawing is fingers stretching out to surfaces to delineate an image and the mind stretching out to the fingers. A drawing excites the fingers and the mind conditions the fingers to accept a pattern of presentation and representation.
Sculpture and architecture are extended dimensions of drawing and painting where mind overpowers matter by various processes of designing and redesigning. The bristles of a painter's brush turn into a chisel and in architecture, it is the chisels that move to arrange a pattern of work on solid materials and metals to create a huge and expansive presentation of a thought.
The human urge to create and infuse a sense of aesthetics in painting or sculpture promotes in him a need to decorate and depict a procession of images from his mind. This desire to impress the world of viewers becomes the quintessential component of art. The dynamics of society, the momentum of various art movements, the mutuality of influences, the evolution of new techniques and the vagaries of group or individual tastes sometimes conditioned by religious learning and social intolerance become the variable factors of art.
Society needs art. It is an expression of the society's cultural climax. Art is resilient, absorbent and plastic for expression of the true, the good and the beautiful, and an artist is the best example of the "social human being". Through its artists, society can see, hear and feel the aspects of its world that it never experienced before. The insight of the artist helps to create a larger world outlook. The visual art can present the visage of an age, through historical and mythological paintings, portraiture and scenes from daily life. It is the artist who most poignantly expresses the spirit of his age.
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