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 Ramgopal, 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. Venkatapathy flies in the face of those that say that his work is too much rooted in traditional Indian imagery, reminiscent more of Hindu book illustration than high contemporary art. This grounded perspective based on the rigours of tradition is on the contrary what makes Venkatapathy stand out. He has an unashamed faith in ritual, tradition and all that is Indian as a pivotal necessity of his artwork. He has a distaste for Western artistic influence and thus stays apart from the so-called Chennai art scene, its ideological wars, commercialism and hype, all of which are seen as repercussions of another continent in the mind of the artist. His mantra is simple: “One must stay with what is Indian.” Today there are so many artists in India quick to pander to the West in their subject matter and style. Venkatapathy is certainly, and delightfully, not one of them.