THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: When Vini Venugopal’s one-and-half-year old toddler wanted to play with her acrylic colours, she found a solution quickly. She mixed some flour with food colours and let him paint with it. And little Gehan started to paint with his fingers.
“To help him, I started painting along, using my fingers, and got very interested in the process,” she says.
Once she finished her first finger painting, she was very apprehensive.
“It wasn’t something that was commonly done,” she says. “Finger paintings are mostly done by children. So, I sent it to all my well-wishers, and when they got back with good comments, I proceeded to my second and third and the rest,” Vini elaborated.
Eventually, she did 31 finger paintings within eight months. Vini is now holding an exhibition of these paintings in the Lalithakala Academy at Thrissur.
And the people who came to take a look expressed much interest. “While the ‘Tiger’ is a favourite, older people liked a painting of children, by the sea, playing in the beach sand,” she said.
In finger painting, since no brush is used, the lines fall thicker. “I’ve used a lot of colour, and painted landscapes, wildlife and abstracts, among others,” explained Vini. “I also found that oil painting is more suitable for this, as acrylic dries very quickly and finger painting takes more time to do.”
Vini’s tryst with paintings began when she was three years old. Even though she never had any formal training, Vini enjoyed working with colours on the canvas. Despite being a National Institute of Fashion Technology graduate from Bangalore, she found that painting was what drew her in.
Vini’s previous exhibition, ‘Penart’, also took place at the Lalithakala Academy. It was a series done with pen on paper. She was also part of a group, in Bahrain, that finished the ‘World’s Largest 3D Anamorphic Painting’, which was approximately 25 ft tall, and found its way into the Guiness Book of World Records.