The moment before making a mark is where memory and imagination merge, forming the emotional source of the artist’s visual thinking.
Imagined landscapes are shaped by fragments of lived memory, inherited stories, and sensory recall, blurring the line between what is remembered and what is invented.
Drawing on A.K. Ramanujan’s thinai concept, landscapes function as emotional codes, where terrain, colour, and horizon express specific states of longing, loss, and possibility.
The moment before a visual mark is made is a space where imagination and memory converge in the artist’s mind.
Artists map not just physical terrains but emotional and temporal dimensions, encoding memory and longing into imagined landscapes.
Drawing on A.K. Ramanujan’s understanding, imagined or remembered landscapes carry specific emotional registers like joy, sorrow and abandonment.
The moment is suspended in the silence before the first mark is made. A fictional landscape trembles at the edge of sight. It has not yet become a line, or a stroke of colour, it just exists as a pressure behind the eyes, like a thick fog looming over an uncharted river, like a hint of shadow across the plaza where no footsteps echo. Imagination lingers here for the visual artist. This is the private corner of visual experience where imagination fractures and reforms. It is as if one has glimpsed these spaces in some half-remembered past, though one knows with surety, they have never been visited. Indistinguishable from one another, memory and imagination warp here.
The rainy courtyard glimpsed in childhood; its architectural structures slowly dissolve into the memory of a shoreline seen only in photographs. The red earth of tilled farmlands transforms fluidly into the flank of a gigantic mountain. Overheard conversations from a journey, evening in forgotten cities, inherited stories passed through generations of telling until their origins remain a mystery. A.K. Ramanujan, that meticulous cartographer of the interior, understood this well. In his translations of ancient Sangam poems and extensive meditations on the classical thinai system (ecozones), landscape was not only a topography; the misty hills of Kurinji contain an emotional register within them, the trembling of hidden rendezvous, the ache of forbidden longing.
The parched and desolate wastelands of Palai signify abandonment, of the emptiness one feels when one is left alone in that landscape. Each of these terrains bore its own afflictions, its own specific sadness or joy. When the artist imagines a landscape that has never existed, they too are plotting such a map, encoding within it the visible elements of an entire affective and temporal code. In this imagination horizon is not merely a line where earth merges with the sky, but also becomes an expression of limits or possibilities. Colour becomes a language, the bleeding of light as Goethe said and the golden suffocation of nostalgia.
Premjish Achari is an art curator, writer and filmmaker. His creative pursuits constantly attempt to disentangle the new visual regime we are caught up in
