OBITUARY

• 
• 
• 
• 

Adimoolam: A Tribute

A versatile colorist and passionate painter K.M.Adimoolam was the pillar of the Madras Art Movement. He passed away on 15th January 2008. Dr.Ashrafi S. Bhagat, while paying rich tribute to the memory of the departed master, tells the reader about his life and art.

A golden moment of the Madras Art Movement has passed.  It irreparably marks the passing away of an eminent artist K.M. Adimoolam on 15th January 2008.  A gentle and a soft spoken man, I first met him in August 2000 at Vinyaasa Art Gallery when he was having his one man show.  The assignment before me was to interview him as I was researching on the Madras Art Movement.

Born with a pencil in his mouth so to say in July 1938 at Keerambur, near Thuraiyur in Tiruchirapalli District in Tamil Nadu, Adimoolam from his young school days had a strong predilection towards drawing; and this talent was stoked by his drawing teacher who recognized in him a great potential and encouraged him.  On the home front he had no resistance and in 1959 traveled to Madras to make a living as an artist.  At this point in time Adimoolam was naive, unaware of modern art, but carried a baggage of passion and love, enthusiasm, zest and an intense hunger to learn.  Destiny brought him into contact with an editor of cine magazine ‘Cinema Ulagam’ P.S. Chettiar who introduced him to S. Dhanapal who in the early 60s was heading the Department of Sculpture in the Madras School of Arts and Crafts.  The discerning eye of Dhanapal made him realize the immense potential of young Adimoolam.  The former gave him instructions in drawing from life and advised him to join the art institution which Adimoolam did in 1961.  And after that he never looked back.

Adimoolam was an alumnus of the Government College of Arts and Crafts Chennai, receiving diploma in Advanced Painting [1961-1966].  He established his credentials at a critical juncture in the 60s, when within the Art Institution, a discourse on “Indiannes’ was a major argument by senior teachers like K.C.S. Panicker, S. Dhanapal, A.P. Santhanaraj, L. Munuswamy and others on issues relating to questions of authenticity and Indian ethos within the paradigm of Third World consciousness.  From art-historical perspective this was the defining moment for the Madras Group of artists who made a dent on the national scene through the cult of nativism or indigenism.  Within this vitiating milieu, it was young Adimoolam who settled on the trajectory of creating drawings.  And interestingly among the students [who later emerged as successful fine artists] it was Adimoolam who consciously adopted the precocious and versatile line to define his expressive figuration.  To the exclusiveness of color he worked his drawings with such depth that he became its proficient critique. 

Adimoolam through his artistic journey of nearly five decades had confronted, encountered and productively integrated the stylistic influences both modern and traditional.  This dialectical relationship over years of passionate dedication and single-minded vision had resulted in the versatile body of works that are as varied as linear to painterly.  Through the medium of line, Adimoolam realized the virtuosity of this simple yet dominant artistic tool.  With effective manipulation of his linear strokes he achieved not only the play of chiaroscuro but also brought depth of psychological insight to his portraits.  His lines were captivatingly capricious from serious to playful to full of glee, choreographing it on his paper with intuitive strength effectively combining empathy with sensitivity. 

His line was deployed for a subjective purpose and he made it a strategic dimension of his oeuvre.  Theoretically speaking his pen and ink drawings and sketches investigate a taste for ordinary experience in a specific place and social context.  Towards this his series on ‘Gandhi’ and ‘Kings’ amply manifest this ideology of sourcing his material from the social context.  Nevertheless for Adimoolam it was not simply the national icon or the parody of the colonial Raj but everything was grist for the artist’s mill including nature, street scenes, monuments, portraits of eminent personalities, history, mythology and folklore.

Early 70’s witnessed Adimoolam making forays into the rarified field of abstraction with a series of abstract drawings that was the polarization of his deep commitment to figuration.  This significantly marked his artistic maturity, concluding effortlessly his period of figured compositions.  In these abstract drawings he attempts to concretize the hackneyed lines to configure geometric shapes and forms, the inspiration for which came from nature in the shape of clouds, rocks and planets.  As he worked at his visual language he morphed his organic forms betraying his conscious experimentation with his imagined geometry.  It acquired a surreal quality as they floated majestically on the plane of the canvas.   These experimentations of Adimoolam are exemplified by the SPACE SERIES [1974] drawings that crucially negotiated the relationship between form and space, and light and dark in conjunction with his continued investigations of lines that was now employed for a different purpose.    Soon it began to dawn on Adimoolam that he must introduce color in his compositions.  It was a compulsion, which he felt and towards this end he worked methodically and carefully as he brought his works to another stage in its development.  The genre of black and white drawings gradually transformed to colored abstraction with the aid of colored ink in his SPACE SERIES.

Without the crutch of line, Adimoolam composed his colours with a rare sensitivity that fluidly was carried across the canvas.  The bold white areas were not planned exercises rather the saturation points of his tonal experience.   He intuited these critical white areas on the plane of his canvases and rationally juxtaposed it to convey dramatic analysis of their presence. 

With radical changes facilitating the progress of his art, the first half of the 1980’s saw Adimoolam indulging in colors and larger formats.  He says, “How can I make my work simpler in color, shapes and design?  I sit before the canvas, just looking at it.  Suddenly I decide upon one color and put a few strokes on the canvas, without being aware of how the painting will take shape.  After I have placed two or three colours, I tune in something.  The colours lose their identity and gain in dimension as part of the world I am going to create”.  The tangibility of the trace of one provided a lead to the next mediated through his well-orchestrated palette ranging from blacks, blues, reds, greens, oranges, and yellow engaging in a dialogue to create a world that draws to its core.  His color schemas generate feelings of elemental drives and boundless space.  A strong gestural quality manifested his surfaces, exhibiting enormous technical ingenuity.

As Adimoolam worked his subjectivity through abstracts, the individuated planes of color have weathered their intensity, the rich textures that once were dominant have paled and descending on the whole arena of his intuitive depths is contemplative stillness.  Adimoolam with his years of experience has evolved his abstractions to relive the inner vision of his mindscapes through the metaphor of nature ensconcing the human emotions to relate with nature’s moods. 

This was his versatility.  As the years of the 21st century advanced his failing health transformed the shape of his art.  From intricacies of webbed lines that articulated and negotiated his imagery and form it morphed into expansive sweeps and swaggers conjuring images of Ganesha or devi or any other form.  The broad generalization of his drawings once again reflected his critical dialogue with his inner being wherein the passionate needs of the artist demanded an expression of same intensity but physically the hand could not keep up to that commitment.  A few of his paintings in the last six months had become grey and black an ominous sign of his mental state and his physical frame becoming frail with the terminal illness.

If, Adimoolam stood tall within the artistic arena of modernity in Madras, it has to be credited to his passionate dedication to art, single minded pursuit in establishing his identity through black and white drawings, intense struggle to remain an artist in the face of insurmountable difficulties both economic and otherwise by giving up his job as a designer in weavers Service Centre in 1990.  He swam the troubled waters at a time when there were no private galleries, when public had no comprehension of modern idioms and art generally, when patronage was minimum with the foreigners as the consulate members as patrons or a connoisseur who insightfully bought his works.  Yet it was the simplicity and humility of Adimoolam as a man and artist that enabled him to create a personal trajectory – one that will inspire many a youngsters to emulate.