Weaving tales on canvas

From printmaker to artist, Mimi Radhakrishnan's journey is a story in itself.

For Mimi Radhakrishnan, each of her paintings has a story to narrate. That could be because she's a storyteller herself, someone who defied the western modernist philosophy rejecting the art of story telling and turned to the past to paint her characters.

Little surprising then, her characters have a name, the canvas has the narrative, colours infuse life and together they weave the tales "" "Twisted Tales: Between Images and Words" "" Radhakrishnan's latest oeuvre that is on display at Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi till December 30.

And strengthening her art is her experience as a printmaker who learnt her skill at Santiniketan, combined with her interest in literature. Radhakrishnan's work has a reflection of being autobiographical, her characters shaping out of simple events that may have passed by her at some stage in life.

For instance, there's a series that narrates incidences out of her travels to Istanbul, China, or for that matter Mauritius. Incidentally, this also puts her in the genre of artists whose works reflect their travels.

Born in Kolkata in 1955 into a family whose three generations had been to Santiniketan, it was but natural that she follow the footsteps. So Kala Bhavan it was where she immersed herself in the cultural and literary pursuits. She enrolled herself in graphics and specialised printmaking and lithography under her mentor Somnath Hore.

"Santiniketan was like home where everybody knew who I was considering the last three generations of my family studied here. So when it came to higher education, I decided that now I wanted to go to a place where no one recognised me," she says.

She applied for a scholarship to K G Subramanium and set out. Here she recounts another interesting story "" the story behind her name.

"I was christened Suchismita Chakrabarty by my parents. But everyone in Santiniketan knew me as Mimi. That everyone included Subramanium,'' she recounts. So when Radhakrishnan's scholarship papers reached Subramanium, he rejected them as he could not recall working with anyone called Suchismita!

Later, when he learnt of his mistake, he immediately rectified it by clearing her name but the name Mimi stuck. In 1981, Radhakrishnan walked out of the M S University, Baroda with MFA degree specialising in printmaking in her hand.

Radhakrishnan married her longtime friend from Santiniketan, K S Radhakrishnan, a renowned sculptor, and later moved to Delhi. In Delhi, lack of studio facilities forced her to switch to painting and she taught herself the technique in the solitude of her studio.

She chose to work with oils as the medium allowed her direct contact with the surface. And there's been no looking back since. She has done several group and solo shows, her last solo show being in 2000.

Says Parul Dave Mukherji, her long time friend and professor and dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi: "Although the choice of her medium remains traditional, her mode of rendering paint with an almost obsessive interest in the ornamental motifs invokes the metaphor of weaving. With her repetitive application of brushstrokes, she mimics the activity of a craftsman. As a result, the painted surface plays visual tricks on the viewer from far and near; what appears like a broad play of painted areas from a distance dramatically reconfigure into sensuous details moving at another pace, on closer look." A fine stroke of brush there!