Meditation on a lotus pond

A. Ramachandran's?affair with the lotus pond goes back many decades. His lotus?pond meditations are mythically bound and metaphorically timeless. But there are touches of the fantastical. In?this painting , time has dried up and also lent its erosive contexts into the shadows of the?lotus?leaves that don't always match up to the flowers from which they have ostensibly been cast.?But there are embers of autumnal accents.

The light is either glowing in surreal splendour or it is??bleached and in ochre aura – as you come to the role of sandhya (sunset) in the artist's way of seeing. It seems as if?Ramachandran?has recast the?lotus?pond in the dim lit recesses of the Indian sandhya to give us?a?twilight sheen that is full of the magic of caprice of the sunset of one's own life. The?lotus?pond for?Ramachandran?is representative of both creation and cosmic renewal. It also personifies??longevity as the arid flowers sometimes??wilting seem rooted in the mud. Whether in full bloom of the magical monsoon or in??withering despair??the?lotus?pond is an iconic subject for this maestro who studied at Shantiniketan under the stalwart Ram Kinkar Baij and later became one of Jamia Milia Islamia’s greatest Professors.

At Vadehras last year, his?lotus?pond studies were an Arcadian dream sequence. They were equivocal in tone and tenor. They could??also symbolize detachment after the suffusion of?a?floating passion. In this waterbody??of contemplation??Ramachandran's works, these two worlds – the real and the imaginary, the mythic and the real – begin to mesh. One has the sense of looking at something real through the lens of imagination, ripe old age and the sensorial experience of 8 decades of living. Obviously, the?lotus?pond is the metaphor for nature's perfection in the samsara (universe).?

In an interview to me 5 years ago at Vadehras he said: ’ I am?a?realist at heart. The images in my works convey ideas of different planes and views. I am concerned with the pictorial idiom, what should be?a?new language. I am not?a?modernist and I don't need to look at Jasper Johns or anyone in the West to find my idiom. Mine is the language of tradition. I use an extraordinary variety of colours to reflect an equivalent sensual and tactile experience. The?Lotus?as it moves its petals towards the sun or away from the sun becomes my artistic ferment.”