KOCHI: Fancy ringing in the festivities with wooden artefacts oozing with Christmas spirit? Artist Harikumar R S, who returned from Qatar loves experimenting with art and has fashioned out wooden decors that gush with Christmas cheer. For him, art brings happiness, and that drives him to create art.
The Christmas artefacts were just an experimental venture, Harikumar says, who tries to find art in everything he comes across. And the artist has more to his credit. The paintings that Hari fashions out has been displayed at many biennales, the recent being the International Watercolour Society Biennale held at Slovenia in 2018.
Although Hari learned Applied Arts, fine art was a field he learned by himself. Hari, who used to work as an art director at an advertising firm in Qatar, says that art was always in his family. “It was always within me,” he says. At the age of 19, Hari started out by helping his uncle at a commercial art enterprise. And that changed it all. Having learned graphic designing and having worked at a few firms in the state, he moved to Qatar. It was while working as an art director there that he delved into watercolouring.
“I got inspired seeing the works of other internationally renowned painters. I had a lot of spare time and that is how I decided to learn it,” says Harikumar. Although Harikumar loves realistic watercolouring, he peppers each of his watercolour paintings with abstract style as well. “At times, there are some aspects that lure you to a site. I might keep those aspects intact and then play around with the abstract style elsewhere,” says Harikumar. His watercolour artworks were displayed at many of the international art platforms such as the IWS Biennale held in Albania, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and India, among others.
Considering the art milieu in Kerala, he says that although there are many exceptional artists, the lack of international exposure is playing a damper.Although he works with oil paint and acrylic, his favourite medium is watercolour. “I am still learning different techniques in watercolouring. My dream is to become a good watercolourist,” says Harikumar who belongs to Thiruvananthapuram.