BENGALURU: Thick bamboo bushes, lotusfilled ponds and lush green grasses are the kind of muses that artist Suresh Pushpangathan likes to capture in his paintings. Pushpangathan, who recently held his first solo exhibition of the year at Gallery Time and Space, Lavelle Road, mostly sticks to acrylic painting. Hailing from Ernakulam in Kerala, the Bengaluru-based artist says he misses the greenery of his hometown and wants to bring it alive through his paintings. Coming from a family of artists, one would assume that it was natural for him to opt for art as his career. However, his father never wanted him to become one.
“Being a sculptor, my father knew the struggles that an artist has to go through. He moved to Bengaluru so that I can have a ‘normal’ career (in societal terms). But there was nothing that I love more than painting,” says Pushpangathan, who wants to try his hand in wood sculpting next. “I have the tools owned by my father. I can’t wait to use them,” he adds. According to him, the biggest challenge that an artist faces is to work on commission. “When you are assigned something, you lose your creative freedom and the project is always timebound. But this profession is financially viable,” says Pushpangathan, adding that he feels lucky to have sustained that. His art works are sold at prices starting from `8,000. Out of all the paintings displayed, there were three which had minimalistic sketches. Two of them show a woman with a dusky complexion, in multiple moods, at a sunflower field.
“That’s my wife. She was walking by one of the sunflower fields on the countryside of Uttar Pradesh. The moment was so beautiful that I had to freeze it through my paintings,” says Pushpangathan, who says being married to an artist helps because she understands his impulses. After graduating from Chitrakala Parishath with a degree in fine arts and pursuing masters in Art and Design from the University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom, he was just painting without any returns for 10 years. “What is an artist without a struggle?” he says, adding, “It was a time when recession hit hard. People were losing jobs. Who will care about art during those times?”