In his art as in his life, Yusuf Arakkal broke though the barriers of time, place and convention.
He embraced multitudes in his work. By the restless energy with which he threw himself into the many different genres of creation whether it be painting, sculpting, mural art, installations and writing on art, he reminds us of the myth of Sisyphus. At the start of a new day of creation, Arakkal would be ready with a new series and carry it up the mountain. When he reached the summit, his only thought was how to start again.
“I think the artist today has to be something of a performer,” he confesses, “Picasso was a great performer, though he was also the greatest artist of his time.”
That was how Arakkal liked to measure himself. Against the greatest artists of his time and those that had come before him. It explains why in many of his works there are references to the works of the greats as he liked to call them.
A thrilling momentOne of his most thrilling moments was when he was awarded the Lorenzo il Magnifico Prize at the Florence International Biennale of Contemporary Art on 6th Dec. 2003.
This is how he described it soon afterwards:“My work, entitled, “War, Guernica Reoccurs” was one of the largest canvases in the show and was given a very central place in the display,” he says, “but with all those works around I never had any hope of winning the award. There was a dinner concert on the last day. We returned in time for that and just as I was walking into the pavilion, I heard my name being announced as the second prize winner: The Lorenzo il Magnifico silver medal. I could not believe it! In my acceptance speech I said it was an award for my country and that I was elated to win an award in the city of Michaelangelo.”
It was a long journey for Arakkal, the rebellious son of a royal family of Kannur in Malabar who fled to Bengaluru working at many menial jobs before he found himself a place at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). While he was welding pieces of metal together, he was also forging his place as an artist in the heady atmosphere of the city of endless delights that was Bengaluru in its heyday. Even before he had finished his apprenticeship as an artist at the Chitrakala Parishath College at Bengaluru and a stint at Garhi studios, Delhi as a print-maker, Arakkal was holding the first of his many one-man shows, attending every artist camp to which he was invited and making a place for himself in the tumult of the artist’s world.
A soaring imaginationHis mind and his imagination soared just like the kites in the paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. They float in a riot of coloured panels soldered together by the restless brush marks, or indentations of his palette knife. He often worked in a series. It could be a kite, a crow, a solitary bed, an old man staring out of a window with bars, a chair, orange robed monks, women of Benaras in white, Egyptian symbols, not to mention his ‘quotations’ from famous works of art. Like the pirates of Malabar he plundered the treasures of the world and made them his.
As his close cousin and confidante A. M. Sikander remarks, “Yusuf was a very special artist and a unique human being. He was looking forward to having the Jesus series that he had painted to be exhibited at the Vatican one day. Then again, he would not have wanted to be known as a religious artist, but one for whom the love of humanity was more important.”
Yusuf, dear friend, you will be missed.
(Contemporary artist Yusuf Arakkal passed away on October 4, 2016 in Bengaluru.)
