THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Imagine this: A sunny day, and you are at a green meadow with a small creek flowing silently along its side. Veteran artist Murali Sivaramakrishnan’s watercolour paintings at his ongoing solo exhibition, ‘Recent Watercolours’ can paint such blissful images in your mind. The bright greens, reds and yellows — colours he has borrowed from the vibrant nature around us — helps one transcend to a world of beauty and peace.
This is Murali’s 18th solo art exhibition. An avid traveller, he has recreated the green groves and water bodies he came across during journeys across the state and beyond with meticulous brush strokes. Murali is also a bird photographer and environmentalist. His watercolour paintings are Plein air, a process where he sits outdoors and captures nature as he sees it.
The pandemic was a major shift for him. From the vast outdoors, he had to move into the four walls of his art studio in Jawahar Nagar. “I couldn’t go out to paint Plein air anymore. So, I brought out the sketch notes and photographs I collected during my travels. I intentionally used watercolour to bring a certain longing to the paintings — the dying relationship between humans and nature.
Watercolour, as a medium, is quite fluid and transparent. I have also explored watercolour wash,” explains Murali, who was the convenor of the Save Silent Valley Movement in the 70s. He had made a total of 450 watercolour paintings during the pandemic period. Out of the lot, 40 pieces have been selected for the exhibition.
PLAY WITH GREENS
The rustic beauty of South Indian villages, with lush green paddy fields, clear blue skies and mighty mountains as a bacdrop is a common element in a majority of Murali’s paintings, like Paddy and Palm, In Memory of Punchakari and The Fields. He has portrayed portraits of workers on paddy fields extensively, where they are engaged in sowing and harvesting. “The green and forest cover in our state is rapidly declining. It was a saddening sight for me and I wanted to tell this story through my paintings,” he says, adding that the exhibition is a call to conserve nature before it is destroyed beyond repair. Murali is a former professor and chair of English at the Pondicherry University.
At Vylopilli Samskrithi Bhavan.