Planting with the palette

Planting with the palette

Gallery Rasa in Kolkata is holding an exhibition titled Roots to Petals, Peaks to Sea in collaboration with Vadehera Art Gallery of the artist’s works.
Published on

Chameli Ramachandran dips a brush into a dish of black Chinese ink and proceeds to dilute the pigment-loaded strands into another dish of clear water. She then applies the brush directly on paper. As her wrist moves, gradually the trunk of a tree and its slender branches take shape on the blank sheet. As the darker shades are applied, the tree acquires volume. It is as if the tree had grown on the sheet of paper as naturally as seeds germinate. Gallery Rasa in Kolkata is holding an exhibition titled Roots to Petals, Peaks to Sea in collaboration with Vadehera Art Gallery of the artist’s works.

Chameli was born in 1940 to Tan Yun-Shan and Chen Nai-Wei in Santiniketan. Tan Yun-Shan, a Chinese scholar, had met Rabindranath Tagore in Singapore in 1927. On the poet’s invitation he joined Visva-Bharati and went on to establish a Centre for Chinese Studies. In fact, the artist was christened Chameli by the Nobel Laureate. In 1947, Chameli’s mother took her and her two younger siblings back to China.

When she joined Kala Bhavana in 1957, the sightless Benode Behari Mukherjee taught theory of art. “Ramkinkar Baij was creating his monumental work, Mill Call. He would invite us to model with clay. But I was disinclined. I was too young to realise his greatness,” says Chameli, talking in chaste Bangla in the soft and mellow tones that characterise her paintings.

Purple orchids
Purple orchids

She met her future husband, artist A Ramachandran, at Kala Bhavana, with whom she later moved to Delhi. Chameli began assisting her husband; it was only in the early 1990s that Chameli resumed painting. She would sit in the balcony of her Bharati Colony flat and sketch the plants and trees. “I love watching the plants and flowers in the sun and I try to express that,” she adds. Little wonder that her paintings represent the bounty of a benign nature.

Later when the couple bought a flat in Trivandrum to get away from the harsh Delhi winters, the sea began making frequent appearances on her canvas. In fact, the places she travelled to have impacted her works as an artist. “In Udaipur, I noticed the mountains were different—the greenery dries up in the sun and becomes lush again in monsoon. Also, in Trivandrum, I would often shoo away the pigeons that would perch on our eighth-floor balcony. I loved the sight of the birds fluttering in the sky. It had a liberating effect on my art. I learned to break free of constraints,” smiles Chameli.

X
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com