Just as greeting card culture perished, our art form is also slowly dying, says Kerala bamboo artist
KOCHI: The six-day Bamboo Fest, which concluded at Marine Drive on Thursday, was a crowd-puller from Day 1. Among those who put up various bamboo and other items on display at the fest was a man sitting inside a 3x3-ft-stall, poised and focused.
He is B Radhakrishnan, a 58-year-old with a story, about Perinad in Kollam, a village once home to hundreds of handicrafts until two decades ago.
“We had so many hay art craftsmen in our village that we were able to ship a single order of eight lakh hay greeting cards to Europe around 25 years ago. Even today, we get a handful of orders, but the craftsmen’s count has come down from tens of hundreds to mere hundreds. Of them, just a few dozen are seasoned ones. Just as the greeting card culture perished, our art form is also slowly dying,” said Radhakrishnan, a two-time winner of the National Handicrafts Award and numerous other accolades, including the State Handicrafts Award.
At the fest, he exhibited a few of his works. “The art needs a bit of artistic talent and lots of patience. One may find it simple, but it takes a lot of time, up to 25 to 30 days, to come up with some work,” he said, pointing towards the work titled ‘Buddha’.
‘Buddha’ depicts the new era, where Budha’s ideas are fading. A human body covered in termites, a horse exhausted from running, terrorists with hidden faces and various emotions of Buddha have all been created with the minutest detailing. Replicas of ‘The Last Supper’, ‘Gandhi’, a few sceneries and a number of portraits hang behind him.
“Hay art is like any art. You have the liberty to create any images that come to mind. It’s just that the work hours are longer. It takes time to bring to fore the minutest emotions and elements through the medium and that’s the fun element in it,” he said. All it takes is hays, gond gum and canvas.
Radhakrishnan started 42 years ago. “I learnt the art from my elder brother. However, today’s youngsters are not very interested in it; as I said, patience is the basic skill of this art,” he said.
Even today, his day begins by drying the long hays and separating them.
“We can cut three pieces from a long straw. When straw dries, it first turns white. As it dries further, it turns yellow, then light brown, and finally dark brown. These are the basic colours we use for shades in this art form. We have hays that are several years old,” he said.
His ‘Meditating Hanuman’ is yellowish, ‘Thrissur Pooram’ is light greyish and the ‘Budha’ is dark greyish. Radhakrishnan said he was confident that one can lead a good life with hay art. “We create works that are priced from Rs 50 to several lakhs. The patience is worth it,” he said.
Radhakrishnan said he himself has trained a thousand people in the art. “Only a handful of them stick to it. Even my son is busy trying his luck at a corporate job,” he concluded, signalling the hard reality the art faces today.