By evening, Babitha Nair looks tired, but patient. With her is a family that had come to visit her first painting exhibition in Kerala, her fifth overall. Babitha listens to their comments and turns to the next visitor. It is not so common to find the Lalithakala Akademi in Thiruvananthapuram piling up with visitors, but then something about the wrinkled old woman that Babitha had put out in the posters of her exhibition seemed to call the passersby in.
“I am always intrigued by striking faces and expressions. If you look at 10 different persons, you will see 10 skin tones. This picture of the old woman — I call it Daadima — is of someone I met in the Himalayas,” Babitha says. The eyes of the woman in the picture are welled up with tears. “She was telling us about her losses,” Babitha recalls that moment from an old trip. She found more faces to paint from that same trip. A little girl called Kajol whose picture became so detailed that you could spot in her dark eyes, the reflection of the mountain goat she saw. There’s ‘old Jamuna’ wearing a bindi on her forehead, and wrinkles on her face. If you then take a sweep around the room, you will find most faces too old or too young. The only exception is a dancer, striking a pose in Odissi. “Inspired by the many Ravi Varma paintings, I wanted to see how to get the silk saree folds right,” Babitha says.
Daadima
It’s not just faces. She has on one corner of the hall, the picture of an old man in the rain directing the traffic of a Bengaluru street. “I call that picture ‘Never sleeps’. The city is always busy. It is my most recent work, only two weeks old,” says Babitha, who is settled in Bengaluru. She was born in Kannur, but then did most of her studies in Kozhikode before taking off to Bengaluru for her BFA and then a course in fashion designing. “That was a phase. I had joined a company too. But then I realised it was much better to do my own work, and freelance as an artist,” she says.
So, that’s what she does now. Not that it always brings pleasant memories. Because of her perfectionist ways, Babitha’s pictures sometimes run the risk of looking like photographs. A painting of green leaves that she put up online received a lot of such comments. “They said I shouldn’t fool people like this. I felt like crying, but I also realised it is a sort of compliment.” Babitha’s exhibition ends today.
