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Childhood joy A boy waits in the shadows

Don’t walk into Lakshana Art Gallery expecting high art. Expect the expected from artists who hail from the boondocks of Telangana as they dip their brushes in bright light-drenched colours of the sun to contrast with the mundane, dull and uninspiring landscape.

Srinivas Nayak works at the ANGRAU and he paints from memory to create his idylls.

If in one painting he sees sparrows quenching their thirst from a broken vessel, in another, he revels in childhood joy as a boy waits with a winnow-trap. You can almost hear the chirping of sparrows, i.e., if you have heard it in your lifetime, as they squabble and flutter to eat the few scattered grains. Waiting in the shadows is the young boy with a thread, the moment he pulls one of the sparrow is likely to be trapped. A painting cannot be more dramatic than this. The other paintings of Nayak show the usual Lambada women with their colourful clothes.

Fluid strokes, a burnished brush and the tragedy of everyday life forms the subject of Vijaya Kumar’s canvases in which he signs his name in Telugu. See them and a bell rings in the mind of old Telugu magazines where artists used colours and curves to paint lurid images that defied nature and at the same titillated the magazine readers.

Kurella Srinivas juxtaposes the various elements of Telangana and recreates them in the space of his canvas. Be it the aged cowherd looking at the artist or the lone man sitting wistfully looking at the sunset, the subject is surrounded by all the sounds, smells and colours of the land. Devaraya dabbles with both colours and lines but he jarringly ignores symmetry and geometry. But shining through the canvases of the four artists is the poverty, the want and the sheer colourfulness of the people living in the blighted land.

SERISH NANISETTI

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