The ritus are more concept than reality perhaps. Yet it inspiring to explore the shades of all the six of them and paint them on canvas.
The changing colours of the seasons are always a source of inspiration for me. So are the lines, dots and chromatic tones in my paintings. Going beyond the visible world, the spirit of Nature excites me to plumb its depth and find out the essence of Mother Earth. I do that through my visual language. It is a chromatic voyage for me.
The six seasons give me an intuitive strength, gifting me pictorial ideas about summer, rains, post-monsoon hemantam, autumn, winter and spring. True, all the six seasons are not felt in Kerala as much they are in other parts of my country. Yet I have managed to imbibe their spirit in terms of art.
Observing nature pictorially and emotionally, I feel the pulsating rhythm of the cyclic movement of seasons. Poet Kalidasa has given us in his Ritu Samhara the emotional vibrations the seasons create in nature, human beings, flora and fauna. Fascinated by the description and expression in that literary classic, I set out my own journey into Nature.
The cycle of six seasons starting from summer and ending in Spring , has registered as a slice of emotional ethos in Indian psyche. Once out on my venture, I started experiencing the various moods without giving importance to anthropocentric stress in painting. Attributing six canvases, each of 2×3 feet, to each season, I painted 36 pictures in total.
They sought to give more importance to the formal fundamentals of art. Dots, lines, shades, light and shadows of colour naturally flowed onto the canvases. The Sun, as the source of earth’s energy and the star determining the motion of the Earth around it, function largely as pictorial constants in these works. The seasonal atmosphere changes the emotional state of nature — and consequently the minds of us humans too. The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the earth, water, fire, air, happiness, sorrow, separation, isolation…are all marked.
Details of the Autumn are slowly changing to the rainy season.Poetic imagination favour the swans more than the peacocks. Chief features of the season are the clear streams with abundant pebbles and the fragrance of the saptaparna tree, called yakshi palaa in Malayalam. It is the time of germination of different seeds. Like the lover caresses his beloved who is pregnant, the gentle breeze embraces the field with its ripening crops. Sported are swans that are in love with green amber on their wings, as the smell of the milky flowers fills the atmosphere. The clouds shyly cover the moon sending only the rays out.
These natural moods enthrall human beings, animals, birds, insects and plants. The mood is that of amour, one indication being the creeping vines that are reminiscent of mating snakes. The fading autumn sun paints a pale yellow on nature too. Even so, blue, violet and white gain prominent shades. Wind blows mainly in straight lines in the picture but, ironically, in circles too. Sometimes.
