A retrospective is meant to give an overview of an artist’s journey, and draw the viewer into the artist’s life through an engagement which is personal but often they end up being just shows — a mere assortment of some masterpieces. But A. Ramachandran’s just concluded retrospective in New Delhi wasn’t a show. It felt like a diary where the visitors were privy to the recesses of his mind and soul. “It was like a complete surrender to the public. There is no secret left,” quips the veteran artist who during his 56 years of artistic journey developed a unique visual language that is rooted in Indian grammar.
At the humungous retrospective curated brilliantly by Ranesh Ray (and presented by Vadehra Art Gallery) at Lalit Kala Akademi, the paths he has traversed during the course of his journey wereclearly demarcated. The curator selected 1500 out of Ramachandran’s 4000 drawings, a discipline he absolutely loves.
“Go out to nature and sketch’, was what my guru Ramkinkar Baij told us to do and I did that. I realised there are no limitations in nature. You can observe anything and draw. I think through drawing. Even now, when I go to Eklinji and Udaipur, I come back with so many sketches. I can’t live without drawing now. And when I paint, I refer to these sketches. These are all materials for me,” says the artist, a trained Carnatic singer and a lover of literature.
Just like a musician needs to do riyaz everyday, he needs to draw, the artist has said often. And the proof was the exemplary display of his drawings done during different periods of his life — from the times spent with his grandfather to the Santiniketan days when cynicism and anger marked his style owing to his fondness for writings by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and Sadat Hassan Mantoto his arrival in Delhi where he witnessed the 1984 riots and broke away to create one of his biggest and most well-known work, “Yayati”.
“I haven’t come to be associated with any modern art movement because I didn’t think it was required. Before ‘Yayati’, there were traces of Expressionism but post ‘Yayati’, it took a different turn,” he explains. What led to the masterpiece and the subsequent creations was woven beautifully and coherently through a number of sketches and drawings from his Baul, Kendula, Udaipur and Eklinji and several other series — accompanied by the text taken from “Ramachandran: Life and Art in Lines”, a two-volume memoir released alongside the retrospective.
There is a sketch of his guru too from whom he learnt to become aware of his surroundings and to catch different sensations from it. “He must have been taught this by his guru Nandlal Bose and I absorbed all that. I went to Santiniketan where I learnt Japanese art, Chinese art, and various other styles and then started to use it within the parameters of Indian grammar. I feel I belong to a gharana.”
The artist says he was elated by the response of the visitors at the retrospective. “I write in Malayalam instead of English, so I may not have the appeal of Salman Rushdie but I have the local appeal of Basheer or Adoor Gopalakrishnan. I have worked all my life to be understood and admired by my own people. So I paint for the people rather than covering any theory.”
