Artist SG Vasudev was still a student at Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai, when he first met poet AK Ramanujan, in the mid-Sixties. It was through a mutual friend, playwright Girish Karnad, he recalls. “Ramanujan, born in Mysuru, was a walking encyclopaedia. A fantastic storyteller, it was a delight to just keep listening to his folk stories. So the time I spent with him, whenever he came to Madras, was precious.” Naturally, Vasudev was introduced to his poems — in Kannada and English, and English translations of Tamil poems — and became a fan. His verses, he recalls, came across as “sharp, with no grey area whatsoever”. Thus, when he tried visualising the verses, all he could come up with were black-and-white paintings. A total of 28 of the verse-inspired paintings will be displayed at Forum Art Gallery, as part of the travelling art exhibition ‘Tribute to Ramanujan’.
Even as he gears up for the upcoming show, as part of Ramanujan’s 24th death anniversary on July 13, he recalls with a sense of nostalgia the day Ramanujan approached him to design the book jacket for his first collection of poems, Hokkulalli Hoovilla (No flower in the Navel).
“He had come to my studio, and looked at my many drawings, and suggested that I do the cover.” The duo decided to develop the idea further, and wondered if bringing out a series of artworks inspired by the poems, and displaying it along with a poetry reading session, would be a good idea.
But before the plan could be set to motion ( “I had just done seven or eight paintings by then”), Ramanujan passed away, leaving behind a repertoire of works, and unfulfilled plans.
It took a couple of years for Vasudev to recover from the shock, after which he produced volumes of works based on around 40 of Ramanujan’s poems.
As was the poet’s wish, the first exhibition took place in Sakshi Gallery, Bengaluru, in 1995, and was attended by poet UR Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnad; it then travelled to British Council Gallery, Chennai, where the poems were enacted by the theatre group The Madras Players; this was followed by a show at the India International Centre Gallery, New Delhi, where 12 poets paid tribute to the doyen. “We also took the show to London, and Chicago, where he lived, worked and spent his last moments.”
The last exhibition was held in 2003. Thirteen years later, the old paintings were given new frames, and displayed at Galerie De’Arts, Bengaluru in 2016. “In Chennai, as part of the show, we plan to have a panel discussion, titled Lost in Translation, anchored by (art critic and writer) Sadanand Menon, and the reading of Ramanujan’s ‘Alwar’ poems by TM Krishna.”
Besides that, Vasudev also plans to have around three city-based poets look at the paintings and write poems based on what they see. “When I read the poem Hopscotch , it brought alive an interesting visual in my head; so did the English translations of Tamil poems from the book The Interior Landscape ; and an Alwar poem titled Hymns for the Drowning... I am curious to know what the poets see in my paintings.”
The show launches at Forum Art Gallery, Padmanabha Nagar, on July 13, and is on till July 31.
