A brindle cat slinks out of the blue doorway as I enter Sosa Joseph’s studio. She is standing in the middle of a capacious room with duster in hand, her hair in a casual updo. “I have been cleaning the place from the time you said you were coming,” she says with a wide smile that infects me. Two imposing canvases, 6x5 feet, works in progress, with attractive nebulous silhouettes and blend of colours fill up one side of the room. These are the latest in a series that she is working on. Three from them will soon be on their way to Japan for a group show in March.
Sosa’s studio is clean; there’s no hint of dirt but what Sosa is seeking an excuse for is the working mess. There are bunches of brushes lying around, of different thicknesses. A stack of wooden frames is propped against a wall. Tubes of paints, in stages of use - opened, closed, half closed- their caps lying around in clusters are on the reed mat. Medium to large-sized wooden boards double-up as palette, their surfaces smeared with dried blotches of paint. An interesting palette is a rectangular wooden block, as large as a peg table, that lies on its side covered with a pastiche of thick and dried oil paints, its remaining sides textured with leftover colour blobs. “A buyer wanted the palette along with works,” says Sosa when I confess that the mess of colours looks attractive. And like that attractive colourful chaos, Sosa’s studio is a heart-warming melange. It is welcoming.
Perched in a large room atop a 400-year-old Dutch warehouse on Bazaar Road in Mattancherry the studio space is artistic in appointment. A flight of wide, rickety wooden steps carry you to the balcony, of BC Gallery.
A narrow iron air bridge from there leads to the studio. Yellow flowers and the artist’s name painted playfully on the doorway announce the studio. That is Sosa’s daughter’s work.
Inside, the room is a cross ventilation of sunlight and gentle breeze. Big windows on either side overlook red tiled roofs and new construction. Change has caught up with the heritage zone and the studio is no longer isolated as before. “The area is changing and it is good for the cats that live here. They get plenty to eat now,” says Sosa with her typical wit. To her the change has not made a difference. The studio is her haven, a space that allows her complete freedom and peace. It is here that she spends a major part of her day, till six in the evening. Some days she works furiously and on other days wallows around. A settee in the room is to put her feet up. The walls of the studio are full up with works of different sizes. The small ones require a lot of concentration; the big ones allow her movement, big, bold strokes. An unpainted huge canvas, 10 x5 feet, is hinged against the wall. “It’s easier to do big works,” she says when I look at the canvas curiously. “When Mohandas comes here he caps the paint tubes and sorts the mess. He finds it untidy but this is how I work,” she says about the difference in her working style and the studio interiors from that of her artist husband’s. The space is up her heart. She enjoys its feel and openness, the natural daylight and the silence. It is during the rains that her work gets hampered. The mustiness from the laterite walls with the smell of paint is inimical on rainy days. To counter that she has installed a humidifier. Silver fish has wormed its way into a work on handmade paper. Fungus is a problem.
Books on the French impressionists Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, and one on feminism lie around. Basheer and Chaplin are her literary inspirations, she declares. She enjoys satire and it finds its way on to her canvas. The current series on crowds depicts the curiosity of people for celebrities and to her, pointlessness. A crowd watching a circus or one watching dancers are different, she says, about the subject of her works
It’s nearing noon. A cat appears in the window, perhaps time for lunch? “This one is Vikraman…there is Thangachan…. Nagma,” her feline friends with whom she shares mealtimes, family and a maverick life of an artist.
In a space that flaunts her atypical style.
