K Ramanujan, who died young, typified the image of a troubled artist struggling with his own self-image. Ramanujan, who died young at the age of 33, on 4th January 1973, was a schizophrenic. He was found unconscious and frothing at the mouth at the Cholamandal Art Village in Chennai. This artist of tremendous potential was perhaps unable to reconcile himself to reality and committed suicide.

Despite the dark demons that...
K Ramanujan, who died young, typified the image of a troubled artist struggling with his own self-image. Ramanujan, who died young at the age of 33, on 4th January 1973, was a schizophrenic. He was found unconscious and frothing at the mouth at the Cholamandal Art Village in Chennai. This artist of tremendous potential was perhaps unable to reconcile himself to reality and committed suicide.

Despite the dark demons that must have been eating him up from inside, Ramanujan in his short artistic career brought a lot of humour to his works. K C S Panikar, his teacher and Principal at the School of Art and Craft, Madras, often compared him to Somerset Maugham`s character Charles Strickland, who clung to his solitary gift of painting to keep the depression from setting in.

Ramanujan`s father died very early, leaving a small boy groping for answers in the wake of his death. The artist was very attached to his mother. He had an unhappy childhood, what with his brothers considering him a burden and often throwing him out of the house. With nowhere to go, especially after schools, he would find himself on a village carpenters bench, and end up sleeping there.

A recluse who lived in his own world, Ramanujan would often draw or paint and sell his work to fellow artists for two or three rupees, with which he would buy some food.

Singularly untalented in anything by art, he quickly absorbed the technique of painting at the art school, and soon began to paint a profusion of pictures, each a meticulous record of a dream that carried him on. They were usually line drawings in black and white. The images ranged from large birds with wings outstretched, fat snakes, palaces and other frames.

The artist often combined the personal, the absurd and the eternal. In his works, Western baroque style came together with Eastern magical fantasy. To fuse the elements of the sublime and the ridiculous is no easy job, but Ramanujan revelled in this style. In his ink drawings of Ramayan, he has taken the folklore by the tail by imposing architectural settings of the high dome, the arches and pillars on the canvas and then placing fairies, demi-gods and winged animals on them, topped by his own portrait, complete with a hat and a mustache, almost like he is the Master of Ceremonies who is conducting an impossible show.

Unlike his own personality, Ramanujan`s drawings were assured, with huge, bold and intricate patterns and minute details. He had a characteristic style and moved quite often from wash drawing to shading, using criss-cross lines without marring or spoiling the effect of his work.

He developed the technique of creating white areas on paper by scratching out the other parts. Once, while explaining his drawings, Ramanujan said, "An army of nurses came in search of me and from the shadow of the shells, I looked on them in sadness."

He was inspired by the pop iconography he saw around him --- colourful Tamil cinema posters, tales from mythology published in magazines or the pattern of veins on a decaying leaf. He went on to stay at the Cholamandal Art Village, and came to be known as a Cholamandal artist.

Yet, even the company of other artists did not cheer him too much; in later years he became more and more despondent and his canvas began to acquire a melancholic look. It was the best time of his art career --- his works were beginning to get him recognised and also beginning to sell. In fact, the renowned Sri Lankan architect, Geoffery Bawa, who admired his work immensely, commissioned Ramanujan to do three huge murals for Hotel Connemara in Chennai.

Nothing lifted him from his depression, though. His last painting, mostly unfinished, reflected his state of mind. Dark clouds hovering at the horizon, engulfing a large elephant with his trunk raised in salutation and Ramanujan himself, standing next to a wolf.

K Ramanujan lived and died at the Cholamandal Art Village in Chennai.

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