With wall paintings being banned and flex banners taking over, all that remains now are their design albums and fond memories of past elections. Poster artists in Puducherry can only reminisce.
“Election time used to be the busiest period. Even before the nominations were filed, a group of our boys would go from area to area and reserve the walls and mark them with names of parties so that others don’t take up the space,” banner artist S. Adthisekaran from Raja Arts explains.
Even the house owners and government officials used to appreciate our work and allow us to paint political posters on their compound walls, he said.
“Now, there is no work and we are forced to paint small portraits of people who have passed away to eke out a living,” he said while pointing to photographs of some of the wall painting work from his past.
There were three main banner and poster artists group — Kumar Arts, Raja Arts and Muthu Arts — and all the political parties would approach us for their political campaigns.
According to N. Kumar, one of the first poster artists in Puducherry, till around 30 years ago, poster painting in Puducherry encouraged a number of people to take up art since these artists would paint in the open and their artwork was on display throughout the entire process.
“Now, with digital banners, everything is done on a system inside closed doors, and made by people with absolutely no training and no sense of how to portray these political leaders to make the audience appreciate them better,” S. Muthukrishnan from Muthu Arts said.
“It is extremely gruelling work, and when there is an order, often the artists go without food or sleep for a day or two till they complete the work.”
Earlier, each of these artists used to employ around 15 to 20 assistants to be able to complete the orders.
Now, all the assistants have been forced to look for other jobs and many of them have gone into construction work.
