Radhakrishnan: Indira's favoured portrait artist

KOLLAM: Artist Radhakrishnan has painted over 10,000 portraits and has received accolades from eminent personalities, including Indira Gandhi and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Radhakrishnan, whose birthday falls on August 15, 1947, Independence Day, was trained under renowned artist Medayil Unnithan. He started painting portraits at the age of 10 with the picture of V. Sambasivan.  “People were attracted towards my style of drawing portraits. Once I could travel with Indira Gandhi in Delhi which was arranged after she saw my painting. The painting I gifted to her is still at the AICC office there,” Radhakrishnan told this paper.

His career took a turn with his meeting with actor Sathyan. "I used to draw film advertisements then and illustrated the paintings of Sathyan and Sarada for the film ‘Thara.’ Sathyan offered me a job at the Udaya studio in Alappuzha seeing my paintings. I left Udaya after the death of Sathyan," Radhakrishnan remembers. He has drawn the portraits of almost all politicians while staying with former MLA Kallada Narayanan, Radhakrishnan's relative, at the MLA quarters in Thiruvananthapuram. He later joined the KSFDC to design titles for movies.
He has received many recognitions.

“Among those, I cherish a reward given by V.S. Achuthanandan for drawing his portrait. Prem Nazir, K. Karunakaran and Ramesh Chennithala are among those who helped me a lot in my career,” Radhakrishnan says. He now lives in 'Kalakshetra' at Kundara, a building funded by the government to honour his contributions, and teaches painting to children free of cost. It was writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair who recommended to the government to give him an own building seven years back. He is unmarried and practises his ‘realistic’ art by saying “imagination is not real.”