What keep appearing in S. Tania Thomas’ art are circles, hemispheres and the bright complexity of reds, yellows and oranges. The canvasses tell her thoughts, her memories and some stories through interesting gradation and mixture of colours. Her solo show Evolved is on display in the city.
There are two vertical rectangular canvasses in the front, each depicting a time or season. Midsummer has many clocks and circles set on a brown background. The brown itself is streaked and dotted with yellow, white, black and blue. The clock is showing a time past noon, a protractor tilts towards an angle. In Noon , the clock is just nearing noon, there are reds, greens, yellows and blacks in the brown.
Abstract yet lucid
End Of Storm is a picturesque story. The landscape is a lovely blur of colours. Everything is running into the other; the sky, orange sun, its reddish reflection on the water and the inky darkness deep under. They are all dripping and wet, just like a picture from a car window after a storm. Day Dreaming , an acrylic on canvas is abstract and yet lucid. What are day dreams made of? They’re red, especially if you close your eyes in a brightly-lit room, with orange rectangles and silver bubbles. There are dark lines crisscrossing these psychedelic colours and they have a creeping blackness on the sides, to carry you off into a deeper dream.
You look for meanings in Reflection . Perhaps it is just as straightforward as the red buildings in her art. There is a red city set amidst a vanilla sky. There are crosses and flags atop these skyscrapers, and when you look down, at their reflection, they are all black. Is there more to it? Siesta is like a tropical dream. There is sun, sand, water, and where the water meets the sky is a streak of sea-green.
Many worlds
Tania’s most impressive work with colours is perhaps in the Kaka series. There are three of these and one more painting on other birds. Birds has another red city (another element that recurs) and with a silver moon on the stop. A curtain of indigo on the side signifies the approaching darkness. A few parakeets are perched on top of dark silhouettes and a mountain of a skyscraper, lit by streaks of yellow. Kaka 2 has a sandy beach, clouds and ‘v’-shaped crows flying in the distant sky. On the sand, a few sit, peck at a fish and just gaze around.
Towards the end of the show, past her doodles, is A Spiritual Journey , a telling vision of the artist’s own journey. A white being, not unlike a cat or a four-legged creature, dances about in envious joy. On a corner of the black canvas is a tear-like view of a newspaper clipping. The white being is enveloped in a cocoon of three ash stripes with a vermillion and yellow dot in the centre.
( Evolved is on display till November 30 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Vinnyasa Premier Art Galery, 2/11, First 1 Main Road, C.I.T Colony, Mylapore)
