KOCHI: It was in 2000 Susan Beaulah first encountered chakara, the marine mystery that left her totally enamoured. She put out her easel and set to work at Kovalam beach, capturing a coastline teeming with life. She pursued the elusive phenomenon for 11 years, revelling in its colours and creating a graceful series on Kerala chakara. “It took me more than a decade to complete the series. The most difficult part was to locate it, because nobody knows when and where this will manifest itself. I used to drive through remote beaches and look for fish vendors on bicycles for info,” says the UK based artist.
The bleak, desolate shores transform into a buzzing beehive during the season and Susan’s canvas often capture the fisherfolk caught in their activities. “At some beaches the people were very welcoming that it was more like a party. But occasionally I had to explain what I was doing to a suspicious group,” she says. Most of the times she had quite an audience, some of them so insistent that she includes them in the painting. “There is very little shade in the beach and so people used to sit near my umbrella wrap. Then they would look at my work and point out things, asking me to add some extra details. In that sense it was a joint effort,” says Susan who spends every six months in an year in her rented studio at Kovalam.
An artist who doesn’t affiliate herself to any particular ‘isms’ or schools, Susan focuses of landscapes. “I enjoy paintings of observation. Being in a studio and looking at a printed image or screen is totally different from going into a landscape and staying surrounded by it and seeing the changes light brings to it. It’s way better than the second-hand experience,” she says.
The landscapes of Yorkshire and Kerala have very little in common, but most of Susan’s work springs from these two locations. But the artist says it’s Kerala that fulfilled her wish to include people in her paintings, “I like to see figures in landscapes, the organic bond they share. This is something that has totally vanished from the agricultural scene in England. Now we have massive machines there and they just go back and forth in the field. In England there are people working through the landscape, but they are never part of it,” she adds.