CHENNAI: As a woman artist in the 70s, it was not an easy survival but Premalatha Seshadri cut through the patriarchy and she flourished,” explains art historian Ashrafi Bhagat. This flourishing and fight are apparent in the fluttering form of avians that fervently fill Premalatha’s canvas, her paintbrush etching out migratory birds flocking to the delta plateau, journeying from across the world.
On International Women’s Day, the walls of the dimly-lit RC Art Gallery at Lalit Kala Akademi display 114 artworks from Premalatha’s collection. These canvases narrate tales of migration and a female artist’s creative processes through the motifs of birds, often featuring lotuses that once thrived on Bengaluru’s lakes, and an eye persistently trained on nature.
The inter-diaspora and inter-migratory birds are biographical and represent Premalatha when she moved from Bengaluru to Chennai, says Ashrafi. Noting Premalatha’s massive contribution to the male-dominated Madras Art Movement, Ashrafi explains, “Premalatha is an eminent woman artist from the 70s when there were hardly any woman artists in the scene…Printmaking is very obvious in her works, she is very minimalist and makes use of lines.” She adds it was a great disservice to that artist that there was no documentation or a catalogue of her retrospect.
The gallery shows Premalatha’s expansive flight from the 1970s to the 2010s with most artwork detailing hieroglyphic-style and minimalist birds (it easy to imagine this was a journey of the self). The curators don’t shy away from showcasing the artist’s departure from her usual love for birds for experiments — a textured detailed painting of a village landscape, a large abstract watercolour landscape undeniably rooted in nature, reminiscent of a coral reef.
Old photographs of the artist’s formative years were stuck onto one wall of the gallery, decidedly a favourite of the art circuit. The crowd, including the surprised artist herself, coo at photographs of a birthday party with friends, a young, bold 20-something Premalatha wearing jeans, a college photo with a group of four women holding books, and the curious artist workspace with light streaming onto a desk.
Canvas on screen
These photographs, almost inseparable from the chirps of birds to the sound of the sea, feature once again in the 40-minute documentary ‘Premalatha: A video portrait.’ In matter-of-fact conversation, the artist discusses her childhood in Bengaluru, her education and work. She readily admits her focus has always been on the form: I’m not an ornithologist. I’m an artist. I tried to capture the arresting quality of avians.”
In times when women were married off early on to “suitable partners” and art was an unpopular career path for even men, Premalatha still chose the brush over anything else. “It wasn’t a subject to be presented for Cambridge or Oxford or ICSE paper,” she says on screen, but the canvases and artwork that pepper the walls of her home show no hint of regret of choosing this path.
The filmmakers Suranjay and Hiranmayee Dasgupta are careful to slip in tidbits of the artist’s daily life from the swirly kolams she loves seeing on her doorstep, the clipped pink flowers inside a vase, the artist’s interactions with the domestic worker who cleans her house. Premlatha is seen listening out for the call of birds laughing as she mimics the loud cawing of crows, the calls of mynahs (always chattering, she jokes), or explaining the differences between parrots.
The camera returns to the artist working, carefully sketching out a minimalist blue bird. Attention is called to her workspace — a table with well-worn rag, bottles of paint and a billowing purple curtain. While Premalatha initially seems to live a solitary life in Injambakkam, the birds keep her company.
“One can breathe here, think here, and also listen to a lot of things happening in nature. You can see the sun, and stars and feel the breeze. Good energy as you say,” she laughs.
Parallel to the artist’s process and promoting the age-old question of if art can be separate from the artist, the documentarians also take an experimental path to show their process too — Hiranmayee figures in the frame pondering which clips would best fit the end. The audience sees the lighter side of the woman, asking humorously if she can relax or burp now since she’s off-screen.
Labour of love
The documentary, which captures creative aspirations, was born out of a friendship that grew between Premalatha and Hiranmayee, during the pandemic. After Hiranmayee’s visit to Injambakkam turned into an 18-month stay during the lockdown, she bumped into Premalatha. Like most female friendships I know, it was the classic ferrying of modaks during Ganesh Chaturthi and exchanging of recipes that cemented this bond. “We then started a series of conversations about moru kozhambu, Satyajit Ray films and The Beatles. We got talking one day and Suranjay (flew in from) Calcutta and then we documented her work.” Post-editing, the documentary travelled and eventually bagged the Satyajit Ray Bronze Award for the Third Best Documentary at the 5th South Asian South Film Award.
While it is no easy feat to capture six decades of work, the camera consistently captures Premalatha’s infectious amazement with nature. Toward the end of the film, daylight has faded and the artist gazes at a full moon and asks presumably Hiranmyaee what the word beautiful was in the Bengali language. Once she receives an answer, she repeats the word “shundor” over and over again.
ONLY ART, NO REGRETS
In times when women were married off early on to “suitable partners” and art was an unpopular career path for even men, Premalatha still chose the brush over anything else. “It wasn’t a subject to be presented for Cambridge or Oxford or ICSE paper,” she says on screen, but the canvases and artwork that pepper the walls of her home show no hint of regret of choosing this path. The ‘Retrospective exhibition of Painting, Printmaking & Drawing’ will be on display till March 14 along with the screening of the video portrait at Lalit Kala Akademi.