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Real reflections George Oommen’s Mankotta reflections

It is a slice of pristine paradise – so green and luscious that you feel as if you are standing in a paddy field surrounded by running rivers, backwaters, never-ending coconut groves and a warmth created by the golden sun and not inside Shrishti Art Gallery in Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad. This slice of Kerala however, was not created sitting in the salubrious land but in distant Boston by George Oommen who paints from memory of things past of his place of birth and fascination.

If the land is evoked in all its elemental glory it is not with the help of details but with a broad suggestion. So, you will not find each palm frond or ripple of water captured but an image that is suggestive of the realism. Called Visions of Kerala, the exhibition has three motifs: Kerala and the memories, then sacred places within you, and Kanjeevaram (a series painted to raise funds for the tsunami victims).

One canvas is titled Sunset glow 2005, a bunch of coconut trees rise sheer obscuring the sun, that looks not like a dot on the landscape but a pillar of light that creates a warm glow, its reflection can be seen in the flowing river. “Only water can recreate water,” says Oommen a trained architect who taught at Harvard University but is now a full time painter. “To get the effect of rain or flowing river, I use water colours and tilt the canvas in the way I want to show the flow,” says the painter.

George prefers to work with small canvases which he converts to diptych or triptych or even quadraptych depending on his fancy. In Spice Coast 1997, there is a slit in the middle separating the reality from reflection. On either side of it is greenery, if in the reflection there is an element of blue, the reality has tangs of yellow. Oommen avoids the tricks of keeping objects and their reflections, it is a general brush with seeming relation between the reflection and reality, the result is an abstract that looks real.

The show is on till January 17.

SERISH NANISETTI

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