A Ramachandran: Strokes Of Lines That Tell A Story

While stepping into the Vadehra Art Gallery in the Capital,  for an exhibition of A Ramachandran, one will not be surprised to see the strokes of lines telling a story. Drawing to Ramachandran is like a conversational language. Constant practice has given him the flexibility to use lines to express different moods and experiences.

He says, “Unlike other artists, my drawings are not black and white versions of my paintings. They are an entity by themselves.”

The exhibition starts with the early period of his political statements observing the subaltern images, like the labourers.

Ramachandran says, “There are also studies of the murals I executed at Gandhi Darshan and the Maurya Sheraton hotel. Like pages from a diary of everyday life, I have also recorded myself and my wife in comical, satirical and distorted images. I am not ashamed of making fun of others as well as myself. So there are some recent self-portraits which are the records of an old man looking back at his long career as an artist with no regrets to have such an rewarding life.”

Being a prolific artist, he has created a very large body of drawings. One can understand the phases through which he evolved as an artist because they are an intimate documentation of his thought process as to how he should navigate as an artist through the evolving period of modernism to the present day.

Talking about his exhibition in Vadehra Art Gallery, he says, “Vadehra Art Gallery made a suggestion that I should have an exhibition of my drawings selected from different periods of my long career as an artist starting from nineteen sixties.”

Deeply influenced by Indian classical art and Nandalal Bose in particular, Ramachandran is a master of Indian aesthetics by painting archetypal Indian imagery and socio-political symbols in a modernist vein. As a student at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan, Ramachandran studied art under masters such as Ramkinkar Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee.

The cultural and intellectual milieu of Santiniketan drew him closer to the art traditions of India and other eastern civilizations, and it is here that he began his lifelong research on the mural painting tradition of temples in Kerala.  

Ramachandran’s body of drawings consists of not only sketches and studies of his process of painting but also includes images developed from portraits, flowers, plants and landscapes. Over the span of 56 years, he created over five thousand drawings in which now we observe the evolution of his strokes of ink on a variety of paper.

Stating about his early days when he started painting Ramachandran says, “I was fortunate to study drawing under Ram Kinkar Baij in Santiniketan who gave me a new outlook and philosophy to explore as a modern Indian artist. The habit of drawing is an integral part of my art practice. Since I evolved as an artist on the basis of intimate study of nature and recodifying them into my personal style by studying and amalgamating both eastern and western traditions.”