THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Intense passion can drive an artist in actualising the toughest. And the success lies in making the creation modest and beautiful before the connoisseur. Artist Usha Ramachandran’s affinity towards making bronze sculptures is born out of her intense affinity to learn one of the toughest genres in art. Her dexterity in sculpting and sketching reflect through the works on display at the exhibition ‘Sketches n Bronze’. With utmost perfection, she has absorbed the nuances of every element on to the sculptures keeping its essence and vitality on top. Usha, who has also tried her hands in wood, fiberglass and terracotta sculpting, says this is the most expensive and challenging of all. Usha says that “ making a bronze sculpture is a costly affair. It costs in ten thousands. You require some energy to make these sculptures. Processes like grinding and hammering demand some effort from the part of the artist.” Underscoring her statement are the bronze statues of a dancing girl and a soccer player diving to catch the ball. “Before venturing into making the sculptures, I studied the photographs of these actions. When I found them interesting I decided to sculpt them,” Usha says. Yet, she admits that only when you are into the making, the real complexity behind it would be felt. The figurine of the danseuse, she says, is inspired by the graceful dance movements of actor Shobhana. “When I started making the figure, I realised how difficult the process is to bring the movements of the dancer on the statue with all its vitality. Of course it was a great challenge and took a month of my effort to make it” she explains. Yet she feels that the satisfaction the artist gets after finishing a work of this kind is tremendous. It is hard to believe that she started trying her hands in this art very late, at the threshold of her sixties. She reminisces with delight that it was fun to learn the art along with a group of kids in the classroom of V Satheeshan, an art teacher in the city. Moving to her sketches, many of them capture the stages in human life, human relationships and livelihood of man. If she represents the happy childhood in one sketch, another communicates the adolescent under pressure who shrink into himselves and other on the travails of the widows from northern states of the country like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa. In all works, she has adopted the method of sketching the picture in charcoal and then filling the rest of the parts using soft pastel. The sketch of a mother cooking inside a kitchen and the son waiting patiently near her grabs attention as it absorbs the subtle elements of a kitchenette in a traditional countryside. The artist has been keen on bringing out the fireplace, the kerosene lamp and a window with separations made of horizontal wooden stumps. Usha’s love towards her pet, the 11-year-old dachshund ‘Happy’, appears in both sculpture and sketch. “When we call Happy, he looks at us in a certain fashion turning his head. That is what I have brought out here,” she smiles. Happy appears in a sculpture and also as a character in a sketch along with two kids.Though she has already conducted four solo exhibitions and two group shows, Usha is adamant at retaining novelty each time she conducts an exhibition and hardly finds it an onerous task. “If you are serious about art and fully involved in it, naturally it would not be painstaking,” she smiles. From 10 am to 6 pm, the exhibition is on at the Alliance Francaise de Trivandrum till March 2.
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