Artist inspires school-goers to set world records

It wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci or Pablo Picasso, but the wall painters who drew R Sivaraman to pick up a paintbrush when he was all of 11. “Growing up in Kanniyakumari, the humble wall painters were my heroes. Witnessing them paint bare walls and give them life fascinated me quite a bit. I owe it to the wall painters for getting me interested in wanting to work with colours, as I wanted to replicate what they would paint on the walls. My family members were into agriculture, but my heart was in painting,” says 33-year-old Sivaraman.

Once he decided to pursue art as his profession, Sivaraman moved to Chennai to study fine arts at the Government College of Fine Arts. “I couldn’t get any support to move ahead in my career and had to struggle a lot for a few years. That was when I decided to do something extraordinary through book-sketching, which has the entire text from a book within a drawing. I wanted to attempt national and international records so as to gain encouragement for my work,” recalls Sivaraman, who later founded city-based arts academy. At his institute, he trains students as young as 5 to aim at creating record-setting art works.

His work named the ‘New Testament’ features the text from the religious scripture in minuscule letters over a sketch of Jesus Christ cradled in his mother’s lap. The artwork, which draws from Italian sculptor Michelangelo’s sculpture Pieta, has won a mention in the Limca Book of Records in 2010. From then on, while the artist continued to set at least another dozen records for his other artworks, he has also been training an army of young artists to set newer records. The artist’s thumb painting of the late President APJ Abdul Kalam helped him set a Triumph World Record last year, and another attempt to include all the writings from the Bible within a sketch got him a mention in the Unique World Records. These minuscule sketches require hours of toil, and can be read clearly using a magnifying glass.

“Since I didn’t receive much guidance as a child, I was keen to support kids who were keen on fine arts. I wanted to demonstrate to the children that pursuing a career in arts was possible if one remained focused. Even though the records are only an encouragement, children find it very motivating to be part of the attempts and find it rewarding to learn art,” Sivaraman rejoices.

Recently, a total of 71 students from his academy worked on a thumb-print portrait of the late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, which won them a mention in the Wonder Book of Records. Along with a record 2,020 students, Sivaraman will next be attempting to paint a portrait of Kalam on a 2,020-metre canvas. “We are taking inspiration from Kalam’s ‘Vision 2020’ mission for our country. The massive painting will contain over two crore faces of Kalam within it,” he elaborates.

The artist, who funds the students’ art projects himself, laments that recognition for those in fine arts in our country is too little. “It is very challenging to be an artist, since many consider it only as an extracurricular activity,” he remarks.