As the sweltering heat beats down on the few pedestrians trudging outside, S Kuppu sits cross-legged inside her little art shop in East Raja Street in Mamallapuram. The small rectangular studio cannot fit more than 10 people, but Kuppu has managed to create an entire world in there with white canvases and cheerful colours. Kuppu has established a vividly bright spot for herself on this street that is not easy to find on Google Maps, but which will definitely draw the eyes of wanderers.
Kuppu has been managing her art shop, Arts Mundi, for about 15 years now. Her life as an artist began with a German art booklet and a man named Thomas. He visited Mamallapuram in 2002 and when his tour guide learned that Thomas was looking for an artist, the guide took him straight to Kuppu, who had been teaching arts at a school then. Thomas presented her with a German booklet called Ars Mundi, and asked her to paint a few works from the booklet. For the next five years, Thomas came every year to Kuppu to gather the paintings she had made and took them back to Germany. It was Thomas who set up the little studio for her. “I have him to thank for all of this, since he made this whole space possible,” she says.
Even as the decade added more years and the digital turnover reinvented art, Kuppu continued working with the best tools at her disposal — her hands. Pointing out the manual marks on her paintings, she remarks that her style may be going obsolete. “The computer has made print irrelevant,” she says. “A computer can replicate anything —lettering, boards, signs — in a short time. But some of us still like making beautiful things by working with our hands.”
The Dancing Ganesh is one of her most effective crowd-pleasers, but it takes second place to her favourite subject, Buddha. Kuppu has painted 1,000 to 2,000 versions of Buddha. There was even a time when she would pray, looking at these paintings.
The Buddhas flew out of her shop almost as fast as she painted them, she said, recalling the day when one South African man bought a good collection of her Buddhas to take home.
“Maybe, they feel peaceful and calm looking at the Buddha,” she said and added, “I have developed a soft spot for Buddha after all these years of painting him.”
Business is neither booming nor is the income stable at her shop on the sleepy street, but Kuppu accepts it all. “I come here to relax and do what I like,” she says. “If I get enough money for the rent and to buy things for my girls — I’m happy.” Surrounded by her Fevicol and zinc oxide supplies, her bespectacled face is once again bent down over her sitting Ganesh.
