A. Ramachandran
Long before we received ‘Corona’ with ‘Diyas’ and ‘Banging of Thalis’, I started practising social distancing to completely devote myself to my work. I never needed a mask to cover my face at any stage of my life. Even in this time of ‘lock out’, my life is confined to three rooms of my house; the living room, the bed room and the studio. Since I do not even go to the main door I do not find it necessary to wear a mask.
Every day I go to sleep thinking of what I have to do the next day. I work like a daily labourer from morning till sun set with a lunch break of half an hour. There is no preplanned method of my working. The day’s work give indication to what I have to do the next day. If I am working on a large work of 16’ X 6’, the process will be a month long non-stop one. The numerous drawings and sketches I do in Udaipur, Rajasthan are my reference materials. Some times the drawings are minimal like ‘codes’ which I can decipher even after a few years. Since these are studies from nature, I try to reconstruct the extra ordinary experiences I had gone through while sketching. Like a musician elaborating a ‘raga’, I try to recreate the vision of my experience on the canvas. It can be a simple shape of a flower or a complex structure of a human body. So I go to sleep with the satisfaction of having done the days work and I get up with the thoughts of my work ahead. All other thoughts including the socio-political happenings in the world do not affect me any longer.
My compulsive sketching habit makes me dream of smuggling out my sketch book and the fat fountain pen to the ‘other world’ so that I can continue recording what I see there whether it is the ‘hell’ or the ‘paradise’.
Of course, all depends on the ‘visa’ I get for the other world.
- A. Ramachandran
Every day I go to sleep thinking of what I have to do the next day. I work like a daily labourer from morning till sun set with a lunch break of half an hour. There is no preplanned method of my working. The day’s work give indication to what I have to do the next day. If I am working on a large work of 16’ X 6’, the process will be a month long non-stop one. The numerous drawings and sketches I do in Udaipur, Rajasthan are my reference materials. Some times the drawings are minimal like ‘codes’ which I can decipher even after a few years. Since these are studies from nature, I try to reconstruct the extra ordinary experiences I had gone through while sketching. Like a musician elaborating a ‘raga’, I try to recreate the vision of my experience on the canvas. It can be a simple shape of a flower or a complex structure of a human body. So I go to sleep with the satisfaction of having done the days work and I get up with the thoughts of my work ahead. All other thoughts including the socio-political happenings in the world do not affect me any longer.
My compulsive sketching habit makes me dream of smuggling out my sketch book and the fat fountain pen to the ‘other world’ so that I can continue recording what I see there whether it is the ‘hell’ or the ‘paradise’.
Of course, all depends on the ‘visa’ I get for the other world.
- A. Ramachandran