Deliverance for me is not in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim. My world will light its hundred different lamps with thy flame and place them before the altar of thy temple. No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight…
( Gitanjali LXXIII)
These lines, portrayed in a painting reverberating with life, capture the attitude of the artist who has, over the years, proved his skill with pen and brush. In keeping with the spirit of the verse, K. Jayakumar, the artist, has soaked his senses with poetry and colour to paint the lines with enthusiasm.
Vice-Chancellor of the Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University, Jayakumar is well-known for his dexterity in painting word pictures. In recent years the poet and lyricist has extended his skill to visual images as well, filling canvases with abstract images that go beyond the written word to capture moods and memories.
‘The Touch’, an exhibition and sale of his paintings at the Museum Auditorium, which concludes today, has a wide range of his works that capture landscapes and mindscapes on canvas. The proceeds of the sale will go to KIMS Touch A Life Foundation that helps indigent cancer patients to go in for treatment or palliative care.
For Jayakumar, it is painting that captures his outburst of spontaneous emotions. “For me painting is often a medium for compulsive expression. … The more I write, the more I discover hidden landscapes where poetry does not reach. It is these invisible landscapes that I try to explore in my paintings,” explains Jayakumar in a brochure on the paintings. The artist has delved into his close reading of Tagore’s Gitanjali to interpret the famous verses in paint. The marriage of verse and colour has resulted in an exhibition that offers food for thought and solace.
The abstracts, some accompanied by lyrical verses from the Gitanjali , are rendered in colours that range from sombre hues of blues and purples to brilliant splashes of reds and oranges. The River Sutra series of four paintings depict different moods of a waterscape or is it life itself? If River Sutra –1 resembles a thick flow of sluggish red, River Sutra – 2 has eddies of bluish green whorls in a calm water body. River Sutra – 3 changes the mood with a cerulean background while River Sutra – 4 shows a night scene of a bamboo thicket on the bank of a river. Birth of Memory is made up of multi-coloured streaks floating in a sea of blue, the streaks, perhaps, indicating the flashes of thought that flit in and out of our mind.
Some of the works are untitled, inviting the viewer to draw his own conclusions from the play of shape and colour. It is tantalising to watch such works assume meaning and atmosphere in tune with the mood of the viewer.
