Paintings being done on a wall of Madurai city on Friday. | Photo Credit: G. MOORTHY
Paintings being done on a wall of Madurai city on Friday. | Photo Credit: G. MOORTHY
Artists are beautifying walls in Madurai streets ahead of the ‘Maa Madurai Vizha’ scheduled to take place from August 8 to August 11.
The four-day event would be held at Tamukkam Grounds, Lakshmi Sundaram Hall, Mahatma School, MADITSSIA Hall, Vandiyur Lake and along the Vaigai.
Paintings and artwork on the walls are believed to beautify city in addition to making the event reach a larger audience. Some of the important art works could be seen on walls of Aavin, Kuruvikaran Salai bridge, Periyar bus stand, and St. Mary’s church wall among others.
Artworks carried out on the wall of Aavin are to carry portraits of everyday humans we see on the streets of Madurai city.
Explaining this concept of taking up the newer idea of bringing portraits on walls, S. Santhosh Kumar of Create Artists said, unlike metro cities, portrait paintings could not be seen in many places in Madurai.
“Even if known faces can be seen here and there, the idea of portrait as an art seems to be not conceived well by the people. So, instead of drawing the known faces again, we decided to use faces of unrecognised common people to recognise them through the paintings,” he added.
“We use photographs of street vendors who sell essentials like flowers, betel leaves and vegetables among others. Our team, in addition to sourcing photographs on social media and internet, clicked many photographs on their own,” he said.
On the other hand, paintings on Kuruvikaran Salai bridge would carry the paintings of historical Madurai on one side of the wall and imaginative paintings of future Madurai in 2030, Mr. Santhosh said.
“While we are witness to some of the developmental projects like metro rail, AIIMS and IT parks in the district, we want to show them as comparison to the older Madurai we saw growing up here,” he added.
Seeing this as an opportunity to celebrate the real cultural heritage of the place along with the developments it has witnessed over the years, Mr. Santhosh said that unlike usual enamel paint, the art works were done on apex emulsion paint.
“We chose this paint to get a better finish akin to the acrylic works done on canvas. Moreover, paintings done using this material will have more life period than the usual enamel paints,” he elaborated.
As the paintings could give the walls an additional beauty making them protective from wall posters, they would remain in a good condition for a longer period, he noted.
