Sujith KS
Sujith K.S |
Creatures from an imaginary world curiously look at the onlooker or just remain there in their majestic aloofness from the canvases of Sujith KS. The glossy sheen of acrylic colors accentuate these imaginary sites, where personal mythology coalesces with the popular visual culture. Sujith is a sculptor by training. After obtaining masters degree in sculpture from the Trivnadurm Fine Arts College, Sujith turned his attention towards painting, which he says is his true calling. Last year he was awarded with the Bodhi Art Gallery’s Promising artists award.
Sujith’s interest in painting stems from his apprenticeship with an artist who used to reproduce masters’ paintings for commercial purpose. After his secondary education he worked as an apprentice and excelled in oil painting. Before entering in the Trissur Fine Arts College as a BFA Sculpture student, he had gone through most of the masters’ works and had developed dexterity in oil painting. Out of curiosity he studied the works of Heironimous Bosch, Peter Brughel and was fascinated by the allegorical world of ethereal creatures, human beings and events depicted in their works. He started painting his own imaginative world using oil on canvas and left them for a while when he got attracted to sculpture making.
“After my education in sculpture I decided to revisit my oil paintings done as an apprentice and found those works really interesting,” recalling his re-entry into the field of painting Sujith says. For this young artist with little material resources, acrylic colors seemed lucrative and he started working with acrylic colors. “I took the images and references from my early paintings and posited them in a field of vision. The resultant narratives excited me and went on painting them while keeping my interest in art history,” says Sujith.
For Sujith, the immediate world and its realities are quite choking and he prefers to deal with them through an allegorical filter. “Perhaps, the flora and fauna that I paint exist in everybody’s mind. It is a self constructed world where the individual becomes quite powerful. There is a lot of masquerading in this world and I have found most of the masters have used this technique of masquerading in their works. This has attracted me quite immensely. From murals to miniatures, from modernists to post modernists one could see this imaginative masquerading for transcending the self as well as for distancing the creative from the immediate,” Sujith observes.
The biographical sketches of the artists inspire Sujith in various ways. At times, he feels that the very life of an artist is more interesting that his works. The more one knows about the artist’s life, the more one understands the intricacies of his art. “They are socio-cultural pointers for me.” Currently Sujith is a post graduate student in art history at Kalabhavana, Santiniketan. “I don’t want to be a scholar of art history. However, I would like to pursue my interest in artistic lives through art historical methodologies. Above all, Santiniketan would give me time and space to continue with my paintings,” Sujith talks about why he chose to study art history. Sujith is calm and composed, and he feels that he would find a fine balance between sculpting and painting, which would help him to work with new materials and newer forms of art.
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