Art of radiant replicas

Hyderabad-based craftsman A Srinivasa Prasad's room is full of eye-catching paintings of Raja Ravi Varma and Da Vinci.

The replicas catch your eye as they glow, especially, in the dark. Prasad, who has worked as an art director in the Telugu film industry, calls his creation "glow art".

To some, the paintings may represent kitsch art, but the fact is that they fetch him good business. Created at the Radhakrishna Glow Art Gallery in the city, Prasad's works adorn the walls of the 300-odd International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Iskcon) centres across the globe and have also made it to multiple art galleries in the metros.

An ardent devotee of Lord Krishna, till recently Prasad painted his favourite deity on canvas and depicted the epic, Bhagavatam. But now, on popular demand, he has diversified into 'glowing' replicas of masterpieces of Raja Ravi Varma and other well-known artists.

Says Prasad: "My idea was to spread the message of Lord Krishna but requests from art enthusiasts for other 'glow' paintings pushed me into looking beyond Krishna". However, even now, the majority of the 1,000 embossed glow paintings he churns out in a year go to Iskcon centres.

Prasad took to 'glow' art about 15 years ago. In 1990, he visited a radium sticker shop in Hyderabad.

"The shopkeeper was busy pasting the radium stickers on to a vehicle's number plate. I noticed the sticker glowing in the daylight. After experimenting with various fluorescent and glow paints, I chanced upon a combination of paints that glow both in the day and in the night, unlike the night-sky illusion paintings that glow only in the dark," says Prasad without giving out further details.

"I import the paints from Germany. Don't ask for more details. Just call it the 'magic paint'," he adds.

So how much does a glow painting cost an art enthusiast? You can buy Prasad's work for anywhere between Rs 400 and Rs 40,000. Raja Ravi Varma and Mona Lisa paintings are in the range of Rs 7,000.

The artist's mission is to complete a series of 1,000 paintings on Lord Krishna's preaching and has already completed 500 of them.

In the last few years, his business has grown and the winner of the Lepakshi Award for Master Craftsman from the Andhra Pradesh government, is talking to a couple of people in Gulf for large-scale export of his works.

But Prasad still considers himself naïve. "Though I have learned the A to Z of the business of art, I have just started learning the ropes of the art of business," he chuckles.