At the Edge

Chris Brown, a member of the Inter-Faith Issues Group for the Chelmsford Diocese, recently organised an exhibition which brought together art from India and the UK. I asked Chris how the exhibition had come about:

“The exhibition was called At The Edge and was held in St Botolph's Aldgate. The artists were Sunil Vallarpadam from Kerala in India and David Derrick from London. They met through me because for some years I have been doing some work in south India. This has included time in Kerala where, through a friend, I met Sunil."

"Sunil is 36, lives on an island near Cochin, and produces very interesting work. His charcoal drawings are, for me, very impressive. This was Sunil's first visit outside India although he has had several exhibitions in his home state. He was very happy as we sold lots of his pictures!"

"David Derrick is a friend who is a priest and retired head master. He was in Ndia with me in January and completed a remarkable very large wall mural for a school where I usually stay near Madurai in Tamil Nadu. It is the most 'inculturated' version of Palm Sunday ever seen in India! He now lives in Bethnal Green concentrating on his painting and has also had several exhibitions.”

Chris explained that the theme of the exhibition was about: “the meeting of land and water; the meeting of two cultures; the edge of suffering in a series of pictures by Sunil which are of people he has seen in India but which have a wider significance. For me they speak of Guantanamo and the war in Iraq.”

The figures in Vallarpadam’s charcoal drawings of Kerala’s street people, depicted through the minimum of charcoal marks, crouch on the street their haunting expressions speaking of the pain felt by all who are at the edge of human society. Although images of local people in Kerala, they possess a universality that speaks of all who suffer.

In these 'Legacy' drawings colour is excluded and line becomes the means of expression. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Vallarpadam overlays and sets blocks on colour side by side to build up in a semi-cubist style portraits of a 'Golden Girl' and 'Blues Woman'. Here colour is composition and the depth and brilliance of his colours convey the emotions of his characters.

Vallarpadam is an artist of rich creativity who paints in a wider range of styles than is represented by the primarily landscape based art of this exhibition. In this exhibition his best landscape-based work came when he blurred the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract. In 'Liquidity' layer on layer of green brush strokes evokes both the lakes and trees of the Kerala backwaters while the sun blazes through the foliage in a central slash of yellow. 'The Blue Yonder' is a meditation in blue merging air and water separated only by a cobalt line; a raised track on which a cyclist is returning home. These works combine simplicity of design with a lyrical execution to achieve a graceful harmony of colour and emotion.

Through his looking and his "sixth sense" in colours and shade, Vallarpadam seeks to translate small experiences of pure enjoyment into visual images and by the artificial means of oils and acrylic to arrest motion holding it fixed until a stranger looks and it moves again, since it is life itself.

Derrick, who describes himself as a British idiosyncratic colourist, by contrast seeks a greater definition of form and conveys a restraint in light and colour that seems emblematic of European landscapes. In his most effective piece in the exhibition, 'Queen’s House Capriccioso', the edge is that of a contrast between Queens House and Canary Wharf. Fronted by the diversity of the contemporary crowds thronging Greenwich Park this is a painting celebrating an integration of past and present in our heritage and culture.

As a priest, artist-in-residence and formerly as a teacher and head teacher, Derrick has for many years been a facilitator of the talents of others. In his teaching work he developed the principle of using art to teach in all areas of the curriculum by teaching others how to look and see what is really there. His Indian experience has been no different as, through his two visits, he helped De La Salle pupils create a remarkable inculturated mural of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem for their school chapel and has then introduced the work of Vallarpadam to the UK.

At the Edge, as Derrick and Vallarpadam finally conceived it, focussed on the horizon in landscape in which there would be a meeting between the landscapes of Europe and India and between the cultures that formed the art of these two friends. The horizon is the meeting point of land, sky and water; on the edge of our vision, it is the place where meetings occur. The exchanges that Derrick, Vallarpadam and Brown have had exemplify the way in which being at the edge can lead to meetings that bring together what had once been separated or unknown.

Examples of Vallarpadam's work can be viewed at the BobSunArt Gallery site.