When the morning drink becomes the medium for painting, you know that the artist has been thinking about art every waking moment. City-based artist Dhanaraj Keezhara took 10 years to perfect the art of painting with tea decoction, a complex alchemical process perfected through trial and error. His solo show Chiaroscuro showcases about forty paintings which are testimony to his research on tea painting and his work as HOD of art and visual media at Christel House India. For more than sixteen years he has been interacting with underprivileged children, watched them enter kindergarten and later complete their education successfully. These interactions have created some strong protagonists as subjects for his paintings.
But first, more about the medium. Keezhara (he communicates through his wife who is fluent in English) explains that using tea decoction for painting isn’t as simple as it sounds. One has to get the decoction to behave like paint. Then it has to withstand the damages inflicted on it by sunlight and exposure to air (oxygen) without fading.
World over, artists who use tea decoctions for paintings, have relied on UV stablilisers and polyacrylic to deal with these issues.
Keezhara, who fell in love with the earthy shades of tea decoction, decided to do it differently. Ten years ago, when he decided to give tea a shot, he started to experiment by boiling the tea leaves. Thicker decoctions give darker shades, so he kept a record of the time a particular decoction was boiled. Often the decoction was boiled for days. To give the decoction more ‘body’ the amount of tea leaves used was carefully weighed. For a particular dark shade, he has even used two kilos of tea leaves to get just one glass of decoction. In the midst of experimentation, Keezhara realised that the tea leaves made a tremendous difference. The tea leaves from a packaged box undergo a chemical process after drying. The decoction made from this tended to fade over time. So, he decided to source the leaves from tea estates before they undergo the chemical processing. As he remarks, his friends who work in estates in Assam and Coorg bring him the organic tea leaves whenever he needs. Keezhara has kept all his old works just so that he can watch whether the tea stains would fade or remain intact. Only when he was satisfied by the tenacity of the colour, Keezhara has worked on creating series.
Chiaroscuro has about forty paintings done on handmade papers. It took him six years to compile the works. “Making the tea decoctions is not easy,” says his wife who has helped him with it. Keezhara begins by painting layers of decoction on paper, sometimes applying seven layers at a time. Once he finishes with the tea decoction, he accentuates the forms with charcoal. Art critic P Sudhakaran writes effusively of his reactions when he first saw the works. He remarks how a boy in one of the paintings brought back the memory of “the boy in Mira Nair’s Oscar nominated film Salaam Bombay who is the face of Indian slum life in all its hues of darkness.” As he writes: “These charcoal drawings, with dark background in varied shades made of tea stain, have the beauty of live sketches which you cannot recreate from your memory.”
Keezhara, who is equally comfortable in acrylic, oils and water colours, says that he has always found inspiration from his experience of working with indigenous communities including the tribal communities of Wayanad in Kerala, the Lambani community of Bidar as well as the Narmada valley community during the Narmada Bachao Andolan. This show is therefore, a culmination of human portrayals, tea washes, and charcoal sketches. It has an earthy appeal without peddling slum-porn.
Resource :http://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/entertainment/lounge/art-in-a-tea-cup/articleshow/58672536.cms
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