Passionate artist Selva Senthil Kumar will be exhibiting his paintings in the city. Featured will be his artworks over the past 13 years. Born in Pannaikadu near Kodaikanal, his passion for art saw him take it up full time in Chennai.
The subject of his recent artwork is ‘charcoal on paper,’ P.S. Nandan, his mentor since 2006, had always come out to support Senthil whenever he got lost in his ideas for art. Once he finished his BFA degree in art in DMS LKMS College, Mysore, he joined as a resident scholar in the Cholamandal artists’ village and that’s how he has explored his creativity in producing artworks in the last six years.
“In nature, emptiness is something that is based on each perceiver’s vision. In the midst of all this, there is a search for an empty space, however small it may be”, is how he shared the theme of recent artwork. According to his artistic mind, there is no space on canvas to leave for either the future or the past. “The feelings that come out of a certain structure makes me look for empty space,” said the artist while talking on the theme of his unique artworks.
Selva, from the beginning of his career had an inherited passion for mathematics, the geometrical figures, like Hyperbola seems to him as a lesson in mathematics where it appears that the curves are coming together but they actually do not (imagine the negative space around Shiva’s damaru).
Each negative space seems to create infinity. “When I draw I constantly listen to all the low ambient noise like fan whirring, birds chirping. But when those noises are drowned out by a louder noise, it drew him towards a new feeling and about creating a new image. This is what leads to sometimes uncomfortable line in my work,” he says.
Whenever he tries to bring himself back to reality, he looks at the mirror, which he says presents nothing but facts. Selva worries over man moving away from Nature, which he sees even in the artists’ village, which is an area of IT concentration on the ECR-OMR and with it brought urbanisation.
