The first big break had come from her brother. An order for a six-ft-by-five-ft painting of Sai Baba he wanted to gift his boss. Bhavana R. drew it in the hours she got every evening after her marketing job in Chennai. From then on, she kept getting orders to paint, mostly portraits. Bhavana, who believed in realistic images, got a bit of mentoring from Suresh, who runs the Prussian Blue Art Hub in Kochi. And here, she has come now with an exhibition of some of her paintings.
“I quit the Chennai job to be a full-time artist and moved to Kochi a month ago,” she says. Behind her is the portrait of her daughter Nandita, as a five year old. “I use photographs to do a portrait, but I change quite a lot — the background, the expressions, the clothes.”
The paintings sometimes become funny, when someone wants to gift it that way. But they are mostly positive images, Bhavana says.
The toughest she drew had been for a man in her Chennai flat. “He came one day with a photo of his dad — a small passport size one that he had kept with him for many years. The dad had passed away when he was only four, and now he was the father of a grownup boy. So that many years had passed and it was all faded. I was most tense, and it took the longest time. I had to make a bigger painting out of the tiny photo. But finally when it was ready, the mother said it was exactly how he looked like,” Bhavana says.
It is not often that artists get to make money out of their paintings in India but Bhavana had been lucky there. She always gets her orders — more at the time of weddings. Some are so much in demand that she may have to paint them again if she wanted to keep them — like her painting of Radha and Krishna on a swing.
“It is not that I think poorly of modern art. It is just that I don’t understand them and I want to give my viewers what they could understand.”
Her exhibition — The Chromatic Space — ends on May 20.
