Painted stories of a divine sisterhood

A painter who had dabbled in realistic work until then, inspiration, for artist V Ramesh, struck him during a visit to the Ramanashram, Tiruvannamalai, sometime in 1998. "I'd reached a dead end when sheer luck or destiny landed me at the ashram. It proved to be a great retreat, and a catalyst even at how I looked at things," reminisces Ramesh, while walking us through his paintings that will soon be open for viewing at the NGMA. Since then, Ramesh has created art works that have a daub of philosophy permeating them. A keen student of the Advaita philosophy, Ramesh writes, "Most of my work is imbued with a deep personal reverence and hints at areas of faith, devotion and transcendence, but it articulates these ideas in an oblique manner, using voices from medieval poetry and imagery culled from mythology."

That brings us to the impending exhibition of his art works titled Remembrances of Voices Past at the NGMA. A collection of his past works spanning 2003 to 2013, the paintings that are the soul of this exhibition, if one may put it so, are four paintings depicting four women poet-saints - Karaikal Amma, Andal, Akka Mahadevi and Lalla Moj.

Explaining his choice of women saints as the subject, Ramesh explains, "I had read their poetry by chance but what struck me was how, though they were divided by time and region, the code in their poetry was almost similar." "Karaikal Amma, who belonged to the 5th century prayed to Lord Shiva to turn her ugly so that she could be liberated from the idea of physicality of the body; Akka Mahadevi, a 12th century poet-saint from Karnataka talked of oneness of beings and had a disdain for outer physicality. The Kashmiri mystic saint Lalla Moj (also known as Lal Ded) also eschewed the idea of physical identity, going from without to within. It struck me that what tied them together was their search for truth."

A constant leitmotif that runs through the paintings is the text - verses by the poets - that piques you enough to want to read and understand the meaning of it all, make connections even. "I have used text as background so that the words pull you, the viewer, in to the painting such that instead of having a superficial cursory view of the painting, you discover the hidden layers. I believe a painting should be like a book, every time you read it, you discover something new," explains Ramesh of the style. Talking particularly about the Akka Mahadevi painting, which appears to be the simples of the lot, he says, "A lot of work's actually gone into it. I painted 20 to 30 verses on the canvas and then painted on top of it. You can see it on close observation."

Viewing the expansive canvases, one wonders about the rigorous creation process and Ramesh elaborates, "It is actually a struggle to get everything right. The ideas one has, one has to be able to articulate them and recreate the same kind of emotional intensity on canvas, and that is a tough proposition. As an artist you despair about how to communicate your vision, but once you are done, when you finally get it right, it feels like a eureka moment."

Be at NGMA, on till March 25.