Venkatapathy, at the age of 70, is a quietly eccentric character, someone too caught up in his own artistic bubble to be disturbed by the mere events of the real world. His eyes dart around his studio assessing the progress of his most recent work as well as inspecting the space for snakes and spiders. Over the last three decades his art has graced a wide variety of subjects and sources, consistently in a figurative style and a two-dimensional format. At the Government College of Arts & Crafts, under the guiding eye of such genius as Santhanaraj, K.C.S. Paniker, Dhanapal and Ram Gopal, a deep interest developed in the folkloric tales and mythological stories of rural areas in and around Chennai. He began to describe his imaginings of these stories in his paintings, slowly developing his own sense of line and personal idiom. The Indian landscape also came to fascinate him, it being the background to fantastical mythological tales that, in turn, were prompted often by the shape and structure of the land itself. In a much later series of works, he investigated the folk art of other cultures (such as in Mexico and Africa) through the symbolic form of the ritualistic totem pole and the tribal mask, constantly relating these traditions to those of rural Southern India. Most celebrated today are Venkatapathy’s series of paintings depicting events in the Hindu epic, Ramayana. The composition of each work shows the great skill of the artist as well as his breadth of imagination in the handling of such traditional imagery. This to him is his ‘very best work’ of which he is very proud. This series speaks of the artist’s role as mediator between imaginative-creative world, the religious-mythological world and the physical real world. Venkatapathy summons up in these works what is primitively and instinctively understood in such an epic as the Ramayana and does this with fluid eloquence and versatility.