Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Memorable works: Adimoolam’s work was extraordinarily rich.

In 1973 I accompanied Adimoolam and two more artists to a Besant Nagar apartment to meet Jehangir Sabavala. The showman that he is, Sabavala made a dramatic entry into the drawing room at the appointed time.

In the discussion that followed I was struck by the confidence with which Adimoolam engaged such a senior artist. Though he had problems with English, Adimoolam made his points, about line drawings in particular.

After school he came to Chennai hoping to get a foothold in set-making work in a film studio. He approached P.S.Chettiar, a Tamil teacher who had morphed into a film journalist and then a director.

Chettiar recognised the spark in him. He persuaded the youngster to study art and offered hospitality. Adimoolam stayed in his house and completed art course in the School of Fine Arts.

In his art-student days, he came under the spell of Picasso and Paul Klee. About Picasso he was to say later, “My mind reveres him as my Guru even today after so many years. The influence, which started mildly in 1964, became very strong in the next three or four years and disturbed me deeply.” Many of his works on Gandhiji show the influence of Picasso and cubism.

The early works of Adimoolam were line drawings. Over the years it grew into unfaltering, flowing lines that are at the core of his drawings. One critic said that the broken lines in his drawings create perspective of space.

To retain the spontaneity of the lines, he avoided correcting his works. Instead he would do many drawings and choose a few. The titles of the books on him focus on this dimension of his work: Between the lines: Drawings by Adimoolam (Value Arts Foundation, 1997) and more recently Lines From An Artist’s Life (Mapin, 2007)

In the Chennai of the 1960s, an interaction between literature and art began through the little magazines. Adimoolam, Krishnamurthy and R.B. Baskaran were the key figures in this development. Magazines like Nadai and Ka SA Ta Tha Pa Ra provided space for the works of these artists. Adimoolam designed the logos and mastheads of some magazines.

His drawings along with Gnanakoothan’s poems in the anthology Anru Veru Kizhamai (Ilakiya Sangam 1973) pointed to Tamil readers how the two art forms could meet at a particular point. Adimoolam’s drawings were often featured in the cover of these literary magazines. Later popular magazines also started publishing these drawings.

The Tamil-reading public was introduced to modern art at a time when some of the leading writers were making philistine comments about this form of art. They thought that all painting and drawing should be some form of illustration.

Adimoolam saw that Tamil inscriptions and palm leaf manuscript had the quality of line drawings. Again it was his attraction to lines that inspired him to demonstrate the possibility of calligraphy in Tamil when he designed the cover pages of books, such as Imayam’s novel Arumugam (Cre-A 2004). Whenever a budding Tamil writer went to his house in Injambakkam and asked for a cover picture, or a calligraphic title, he was ready to oblige. He was generous.

His oeuvre was deeply rooted in Keerambur where he was born, a village in the shadow of Pachamalai, near Tiruchi. He was inspired by what he saw around him as he grew up and his achievement as an artist was bound up with his rural upbringing. The terracotta figures of village deities, the leather puppets, koothu artistes and characters from mythology and history were his subjects.

He entered a different phase in his artistic development when he gave up figures and began his experiment in abstract drawings. This can be called a surrealistic phase in which he painted luminous floating forms in a non-existing landscape.

In the last phase of his career he shifted to total colour abstracts. No artist can ignore colour for long, he would say. It was at this stage that he travelled to Europe, to spend time with artistes and to see the works of masters.

On return he became prolific in production, mostly abstract painting. The extraordinary richness of his work at this phase of abstraction earned him national and international recognition. His works are sought after in Europe and elsewhere. Along with other artists such as R.B. Baskaran and Achuthan Koodalur, he raised the flag of the Madras School of artists.

He has been fascinated by Gandhiji since his childhood. His first drawing of Gandhiji, done in 1953, was a line drawing. In 1969, he was one of the two artistes commissioned by the Government of Tamil Nadu to do a series of portraits of Gandhiji He worked with passion and speed and produced a number of memorable works. He captured the spirit of Gandhiji in a few, simple lines.

Jaya Appasamy recorded in Lalitkala in 1978, that of all the Gandhiji portraits by various artists, it was Adimoolam that appealed to her most. His involvement with this motif continued till 1974 when he moved on to a different phase in his career, from black and white linear forms to radiant abstracts of vibrant hues.

A.S. Raman said of Adimoolam “Line speaks its own language and speaks best through figure. Colour also speaks its own language and speaks best without figures. Not many artists can claim mastery on both the languages.”

I first met K.M. Adimoolam in August 2000 at Vinyaasa Art Gallery when he was having his one-man show when I was researching on the Madras Art Movement.

Born with a pencil in his mouth, so to say, in July 1938 at Keerambur, in Tiruchirapalli District in South India, Adimoolam from his young school days had a strong predilection towards drawing. This talent was stoked by his drawing teacher.

On the home front he had no resistance and, in 1959, travelled to Madras to make a living as an artist. At this point, Adimoolam was naive, unaware of modern art, but was intense in his urge and enthusiasm to learn.

Destiny brought him into contact with an editor of Cinema Ulagam, P.S. Chettiar. Chettiar introduced him to S. Dhanapal who, in the early 1960s, headed the Department of Sculpture in the Madras School of Arts and Crafts. Dhanapal’s discerning eye recognised young Adimoolam’s immense potential. He advised Adimoolam to join the art institution, which he did in 1961. And never looked back.

Adimoolam established his credentials at that critical juncture in the 1960s when a discourse on “Indiannes’ was a major argument that senior teachers like K.C.S. Paniker, S. Dhanapal, A.P. Santhanaraj, L. Munuswamy and others used on issues relating to authenticity and Indian ethos within the paradigm of Third World consciousness. Within this vitiating milieu, young Adimoolam settled on the trajectory of creating drawings.

Adimoolam through his artistic journey of nearly five decades had confronted, encountered and productively integrated the stylistic influences both modern and traditional. Through the medium of line, Adimoolam realised the virtuosity of this simple yet dominant tool.

With effective manipulation of his linear strokes he achieved not only the play of chiaroscuro but also brought depth of psychological insight to his portraits. His lines were captivatingly capricious from serious to playful to full of glee, choreographing it on his paper with intuitive strength effectively combining empathy with sensitivity.

Theoretically speaking his pen and ink drawings and sketches investigate a taste for ordinary experience in a specific place and social context. His series on “Gandhi” and “Kings” amply manifest this ideology of sourcing his material from the social context. Nevertheless for Adimoolam it was not simply the national icon or the parody of the colonial Raj but everything was grist for the artist’s mill including nature, street scenes, monuments, portraits of eminent personalities, history, mythology and folklore.

The early 1970s saw Adimoolam move into the field of abstraction. As he worked at his visual language he morphed his organic forms to imagined geometry. It acquired a surreal quality as they floated majestically on the plane of the canvas.

These experimentations of Adimoolam are exemplified by the “Space” series (1974). It gradually dawned on him that he must introduce colour. The genre of black and white drawings gradually transformed to coloured abstraction with the aid of coloured ink in “Space” series.

Without the crutch of line, Adimoolam composed his colours with a rare sensitivity and fluidity. The bold white areas were not planned exercises rather the saturation points of his tonal experience.

He intuited these critical white areas on the plane of his canvases and rationally juxtaposed it to make it dramatic. With these radical changes the first half of the 1980s saw Adimoolam indulging in colours and larger formats.

A strong gestural quality manifested his surfaces, exhibiting enormous technical ingenuity, when he relived the inner vision of his mindscapes through the metaphor of nature ensconcing the human emotions with it.

If today, Adimoolam stands tall within the artistic arena of modernity in Madras, it was due to his passionate dedication to art, single minded pursuit in establishing his identity through black and white drawings, intense struggle to remain an artist in the face of insurmountable difficulties both economic and otherwise by giving up his job as a designer in the Weavers Service Centre in 1990.

He swam the troubled waters at a time when there were no private galleries, when public had no comprehension of modern idioms and art generally, when patronage was minimum.

Yet it was the simplicity and humility of Adimoolam as a man and artist that enabled him to create a personal trajectory, one that will inspire many a youngster to emulate.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail