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

Colours of perspective

PHOTOS: K. GOPINATHAN

THE WORLD his CANVAS Balan Nambiar looks at art as an interesting combination of maths, history of art and architecture

Meeting the affable 72-year-old Balan Nambiar was marked with conversations about art and politics, browsing through his enviable library, ending with a lunch date spiced with fish fry.

He was born into a traditional farming community in Kannapuram, in the Kannur district of north Kerala.

“It is a small village where we owned a small plot of land and I used to plough the field. We weren’t landlords, but I remember my grandmother always issuing orders about what to do on the land. The first task I remember doing was to fetch grass from the field for the calf.”

On a foggy day in May, Balan, a class X student, came to Bangalore to visit his maternal uncle on holiday. “I took a bus from Kannur to Mysore and then came to Bangalore. I wondered at this strange city where people wore woollens in May and was unused to its smells as I was used to farm smells!” He describes very matter-of-factly how he walked from Majestic to Cox Town, found a bunch of children playing a game like hockey to be funny. The Vidhana Soudha was not even complete. After that vacation, he was to return to Bangalore only 11 years later.

“As a child, I was always interested in maps and crafts, drawing and mathematics and eventually joined the railways in Madras. I enrolled in a diploma course in mechanical engineering, but I was always involved in art exhibitions and interacting with art students and teachers.”

He traces the interesting and useful combination of maths and drawing right through the history of art and architecture from the Renaissance period with the golden ratio. “Aversion towards maths has all to do with how good or bad your first maths teacher was!”

In ’67 he finally enrolled for a diploma in Fine Arts at the College of Arts and Crafts in Madras. “An uncle read an article about my exhibition in the papers and termed my move to give up a respectable railways job for art as arrogance. I have never regretted that decision, and I plunged into the world of art.” College, he found, gave him all the freedom; he never attended art history classes as he knew more than the teachers themselves! “I firmly believe in formal training in art as you not only develop talent, but also make it a regular habit to practise art,” says Balan. In his final year, he spent six months in the metallurgy department in IIT Madras where he used modern materials with the traditional methods of casting. It was in college where he found his interest as a sculptor and has used clay moulded incement, wax in bronze, , steel and from ’97 onwards, stainless steel.

When he moved to Bangalore in ’71, he recalls there were only two freelance artists in the city, the rest working for a firm. “I could never work under someone nor could I work in a group,” reveals Balan. He conducted art classes with the Bangalore Art Club and got an opportunity in ’77, thanks to Air India, to travel to France and Germany. “My stay was extended and I spent 13 months in Europe visiting museums, galleries and exhibitions and even had special permission to go through their archives.”

As a versatile artist, Balan says there are very few artistes who are articulate. “ K.G. Subramanyan is a good speaker, a philosopher and a non-controversial artist.”

In ’96 his work, Monument to the Assassinated, in memory of the Babri Masjid demolition borrows from the story Sugriva and Bali in Ramayana. For those who are condescending about art, Balan notes simply: “As children, they have not had the opportunity to play with colours.”

Visit www.balannambiar.com

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