The painter of signs
Please ignore title. It was pure unadulterated click bait and I suspect will not be a very successful one at that. After who all read RK Narayanan nowadays? And of those who do, who would have read “The painter of signs”?
The old town part of Bhubaneshwar , Orissa is full of ancient temples and if one is not careful, you might find a half ton stone falling on ones head from one. To drift a bit, when my father was renovating our ancestral house, the top dome of a really ancient neighboring temple was found in the compound. It must have fallen a few centuries back. I don’t know it found its way back , maybe the government “did the needful” as we Bangaloreans say.
Walking through the old town is always a spiritually uplifting experience as long as one ignores the dirt, the cows , the end product of their digestive system dropped all over. Every corner has an old temple. The newer ones are around 800 years old and the older ones maybe 1000+. I sometimes dreamily think of my ancestors walking on these very paths and visiting each temple in their search for the divine. I do ignore the basic flaw in my dreams, which is , my first ancestor to come here was my grandfather in 1965.
As always, when I need to clear my head, I walk around the house and one of these I saw this person sitting next to the Kedagauri temple sketching away. He was complete engrossed in his art and did not make any attempt at selling his creations, I don’t think his work would be exhibited in the Louvre anytime in the near future , but I was sure it would adorn the walls of my house.
So my daughter, who was as impressed as I was with his sketches, and I picked up a couple of his paintings and proceeded for commercial negotiations. While painting might have been his core competence, bargaining was definitely not and he quoted a very lower than reasonable figure. He seemed to approve my daughter’s admiration for his work and he reduced prices even further. We then started a strange form of reverse negotiation where we were asking him to stick to his original price and to be kind enough to actually increase it somewhat but he was very adamant. He then proceeded to give daughter a complementary sketch too. Kind hearted that she is (no doubt comes from lineage), she added a surcharge hoping he would not notice, but the painter compensated for his lack of negotiating skills with sharp eyes. He caught on, returned the money and admonished her for her unethical practice. The paintings were subsequently framed and found their way in her house and ours.
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ON my last visit I asked him to make a painting of the Parsurameshwar temple, this being very difficult to photograph because of the large banyan tree in the front. He agreed but I forgot about it and assumed he had too.
To give some context, the temple is one of the oldest in Orissa and built around the 8th century. It has a strong attraction to me due to its proximity to home and I remember always being drawn to it, seeing its magnificent architecture and the preservation.
I have written a bit about it earlier and its overlord here:
https://deepakmisra.medium.com/oppo-bhaina-the-affable-priest-2d9b532e003b
Sadly Oppo bhaina left this world a few years back and there is a sense of void when I pass nowadays.
A few days back I was walking and found him there painting with same speed as before. I was even more astonished that he had actually made a painting for me and kept if for so many months. We examined it and concurred that it was a bit small to display. He offered to make a bigger one and asked me to come next day. I did not expect him to have actually made it but to my surprise he had. He handed it over but then took it back because he felt some finishing touches were required. With no offense to him, I felt that the finishing touches made it worse, but then he was the artist not me.
He requested me to sit on the road with him during the finishing touches and he asked me for my obsession with the temple. When he heard my story, he asked me to explain to him the history of the temple, a subject of which among many others I had no knowledge.
I hemmed and hawed and said ‘later”. I told him that we should save it for a rainy day , notwithstanding the weak point in my argument was that it had already started raining.
Changing track, I used the rain as an excuse I rushed home clutching my new possession under my arms
I of course concluded commercial negotiations a bit shocked by the small amount he was asking. I told him that my daughter had said to pay double of whatever he asked which seemed to please him but he could not accept and finally settled on something in between
Reaching home I found him cycling , his entire art work in a big bag and he protecting himself from the rain by holding an umbrella while cycling.
So if you are in that area, please find him and become a patron of arts yourself.
