The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Art, the love of her life

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Friday, Sep 19, 2008
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Art, the love of her life

Staff Reporter

— Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash

vibrant: Radhika Chand’s abstracts can be anything the viewer wants them to be.

Bangalore: Her paintings have been described as being “evocative of exquisite textiles,” as “offering an experience of life through a kaleidoscope,” as being “reminiscent of the ‘dot’ paintings of Australian Aboriginals”. The truth is that Radhika Chand’s abstract watercolours — bold and intricate at once — can be anything the viewer wants them to be.

“Visitors to her exhibitions have told me that they can see forms of animals. Others see deities. I believe I have seen a bust of Lenin in one of them!” said her father Ramesh Chand who was visiting Radhika’s ongoing art exhibition here that has been curated by Anjolie Ela Menon. “These interpretations lie in the eyes of the beholder.”

As someone born with Down’s Syndrome, Radhika says she is asked the strangest of questions: “People have asked me to show them how I hold a brush or how I handle paper,” she says with an ironic smile. Very much an established artist at just 36, and having exhibited her work several times over, Radhika shows her visitors around the exhibition gallery. This is the first time in Bangalore for Radhika, who lives in Delhi where she teaches art at a school. Her paintings, some vividly colourful and others starkly black and white, already have “sold” stickers on them. Anjolie Ela Menon once described her works as “one of the best-kept secrets of the Indian art scene.” Mr. Chand says he cannot forget his daughter’s first exhibition 15 years ago: “When her first painting was sold, I remember she was inconsolable. She cried like she was parting with her child.”

She is happiest when she is painting, says Radhika. “I paint for five, sometimes six hours at a stretch and return to my (canvas) every day until the work is over.” There appears to be no preconceived plan, says her father. “But then you see an outline emerge and finally the colours are filled in.” Barring a few years in Australia when she was taught art as a child, Radhika has never been tutored: her paintings are supremely her own. And art, says her father, is undeniably the “love of her life”.

Radhika’s exhibition is on at Gallery-G and will conclude on September 22.

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