Perhaps it is the location, on a quiet lane in Sasthamangalam, Thiruvananthapuram. Renowned artist B.D. Dethan’s art gallery calms down the visitor stepping in from the hot sun and midday traffic. And just as you blink your eyes and wipe away the sweat, you appear to have landed in 1975. At first, in Muthu Koya’s villages, beaches and boats and men talking under trees. Then the distant lands of old forts and evening trees, put onto paper by Sadhu Aliyar. And finally in the mornings and nights that Sunil Linus De creates in his paintings. The three renowned artists have fondly picked up a medium children begin to paint with and later discard – watercolour.
“Few work on watercolour these days. But there is a lot of acceptance, a lot of admirers for this medium,” Sunil says. His painting of a couple walking in the rain, bringing into your head the old Hindi song ‘Pyar Hua...’, stands out in a corner of Dethan’s inside walls. “It’s that simplicity, that easy beauty that makes it easy for watercolour paintings to communicate to a viewer. There is no complication. It is transparent,” says Sunil, who grew up in a village in Kottayam. Rest of the paintings walk through villages, the odd house you see on top of mud steps, showing, in Sunil’s words, the feeling of loss. He plays with light, to give his pictures a time of the day – morning, evening, twilight.
Whites are a big part of Sadhu Aliyar’s work, but the paper-white he strictly leaves behind. “You are not to use black or white in watercolour,” he says. It is a very tough medium, and people fear to use it. “In other mediums, you can make any number of changes, corrections, even years later. In watercolour, you have to get it right in the first attempt or else you throw the paper.” The paper called Arches that comes from France. Sadhu, in his paintings, has brought a fort from Pune and monuments from Delhi. He also has Ockhi, the way he saw it, when there was a painting camp in tribute to Punathil Kunjabdulla, at the same time the cyclone was creating havoc.
Up front are Koya’s villages, the way he remembers them from decades ago. “Otherwise, I draw surrealistic images. But when it is watercolour, I tend to go back to my roots, pick up my nostalgia and paint images that are no longer there,” he says.
The exhibition titled 'Whisper in the Valley' will be on at the Suryakanthi Gallery till January 20.
