Known for his contribution to the world of abstract and contemporary art, National Award winning Yusuf Arakkal’s most recent work was Faces of Creativity, a visual tribute to 135 Indian artists
Poet, playwright and painter Gieve Patel. Pics/Galerie Sara Arakkal
Known for his contribution to the world of abstract and contemporary art, National Award winning Yusuf Arakkal’s most recent work was Faces of Creativity, a visual tribute to 135 Indian artists.
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Artist Krishen Khanna
Arakkal, who passed away at the age of 71 on Tuesday morning in Bengaluru, had shown these drawings in July this year at Galerie Sara Arakkal – named after his wife – and also launched a book compiling the 135 portraits.
Modernist Akbar Padamsee
A sculptor and poet himself, Arakkal pays a visual homage to a range of Indian artists – right from the Bengal School of Art to contemporary sculptors. Arakkal is known to have said that he had a penchant for the human figure, giving importance to the face. In the 1960s, he was taught for a year and a half by Jaya Varma (the grand nephew of Raja Ravi Varma) in European academic portraiture.
Contemporary Indian artist Sakti Burman
“My travel to Europe and America gave me access to sketch a lot of Western and African nationals. This helped me to understand various human characters. I happen to paint and draw a number of my artist friends too. It is from this experience that I decided to depict the creative personalities of Indian contemporary art,” he had stated.
A tribute to the late Yusuf Arakkal by Riyas Komu, artist and co-founder of Kochi Biennale, made exclusively for mid-day and drawing inspiration from portraiture series as seen in Faces of Creativity
A winner of the Raja Ravi Varma Puraskaram in 2013, Arakkal worked on Faces of Creativity for the last three years, rendering each portrait on the reverse side of canvas using pen and ink. “My initial decision was to paint them; but, I discarded the idea because I wanted to work in line and that’s the project’s strength.” Arakkal wanted this series to be sold as a composite work, in the form of a book, and not as individual drawings.
Riyas Komu
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