The art has gone from a lifeless paper to a thicker canvas, where the features are not only sharp, but the art piece also gets a near-permanent shelf life.
Artist Ginne Venkateswarlu, who paints with the ‘brush name’ Sagar Ginne, is known for his adoration for pointillism, the art of using only dots. He has changed the medium from paper to canvas, 17 years after he started giving wings to his fantasy for ‘dot painting’.
So, what’s so special about canvas? Sagar has been using colour refill pens to perennially tap thousands of dots on a white paper. Apart from taking months for a painting, the ‘perishable’ nature of paper constantly made the fear of losing his cherished art work dangle over his head. The change became possible after he stumbled across permanent pens available in a dozen colours. In the new format, he first paints the canvas white and then makes random dots as the image demands. The larger dots of permanent pens left a bigger imprint and thus made things easy, while the soft touch made it less arduous for the artist. The indirect advantage is the growing size of the images.
“The largest I have drawn on paper was 24” x 30”, but on canvas, I am currently drawing Lord Venkateswara image measuring 5.5 ft tall and 3 ft wide in a much shorter duration,” Mr. Sagar told The Hindu .
Apart from devotional paintings like Dasavatharam, Virat Swaroopam etc., he has drawn images of a tribal woman, former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao etc., all using dots. His latest portrait on Mother Teresa made on her getting sainthood is now on display at the Vijayawada expo.
Mr. Sagar, who works as an instructor in traditional painting at TTD’s Sri Venkateswara Institute of Traditional Sculpture and Architecture (SVITSA), recently received his Ph.D. for his study on ‘Traditional paintings in Andhra with reference to Kalamkari, Nakashi and Nirmal’, under the supervision of SVU professor D. Kirankranth Chowdary. He gave his first exhibition ‘Voice of colour dots’ in December 1999, while the second one ‘Voice of Palamoor dots’ (named after his native district) was inaugurated by the then Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu at the Mahabubnagar Municipality’s golden jubilee celebrations in 2001.Sagar now plans to redraw some of his old paper paintings on eye-catching themes like Ardhanareeswara, Hari-Hara, Sripathi, etc. on canvas, aiming at immortalising them.
