LURU Hangs with… painter Anpu Varkey

Life is better in colour.

On Church Street, under the sharp sun of a winter morning in Bengaluru, we – the LURU Newsletter duo – met up with painter Anpu Varkey. Together, we took shade beneath her mural titled Leisure. A striking image of a woman, smirking to herself, reading a book with a marmalade cat on her lap. It’s painted on an imposing wall within the premises of the Parisara Bhavan, the offices of the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board.

“It’s the portrait of a very dear friend of mine,” Anpu reveals, “on a summer afternoon quietly reading a book.” She goes on to draw our attention to “the importance of the sari being a thin material, and softly draping her” to capture a “summery feel.” She also points out the interplay of the other textures: “the softness of the cat meets the hardness of a book cover.”  When we notice the fingers of the subject frozen in distracted action, displaying callous care when holding the cat, Anpu bursts into laughter at our phrasing. “Ya, it is a very awkward positioning for the cat as well but I wanted her to hold the cat a little hard, not soft. Like it’s fallen asleep on her leg, and she doesn’t want it to slip off. But she’s still at repose,” she underscores. “I wanted to represent a woman collecting her thoughts, and that becoming an important act of self-care.”

Paint nothin’ stoppin’ us now

Anpu didn’t plan to do murals, “it came to her” while she was doing it. And Anpu kept pursuing it. “I was up a 20-foot ladder, drawing a line and my nose was touching the wall – and I realise, I have no idea what I’m doing,” says Anpu, recalling her first time painting a public mural over a decade ago. “But the fact that I was atop a ladder that high made me happy,” she adds. “It was such simple pleasures. And I had not derived such simple pleasures my entire career.”

She spoke about studying art, juggling between art and living a life, hustling all the time, wanting “to make things that are necessary and important.” But it was “the simple feeling of being suspended in air” while painting a mural in public that Anpu “needed to feel content, grounded, and elated in every way.” Since then, she hasn’t stopped. Instead Anpu has been searching for “bigger heights, higher moments and a quietness” while she’s up there and alone. And more than a decade later, she “knows how to treat the medium well” and is “very aware of the imagery” she’s putting up within the public space and understands that “the bigger motive is that it must speak to the public more” than to her.

Painting public murals has made Anpu “have more clarity within my sphere of thinking as an artist, and helped me become sharper as a person,” she tells us.

Sketchy proposition

From the bustling street, we’re back at Anpu’s quieter home-studio with her three cats – Jaba, Wuki, and Obi – browsing through her deep body of work.

We begin by flipping through Jaba, a self-published, pen-and-ink graphic novel on her cat; and another called Summer’s Children “based on early childhood memories of living on a plantation in Kerala” and it captures “a single summer’s day.” To reflect the aspect of “fractured memories,” Anpu developed a style of pointillism.

And this choice seems to echo through Anpu’s painting philosophy, “I work very minimally,” she states. It is very important to her that the image “feels touched upon and not painted” because “ultimately, painting is an illusion,” she says. And while she understands the craft of painting, Anpu doesn’t want us to see “how good a painter” she is but would rather us connect to the image as a whole and an emotion. “Sometimes a realistic painting can make you feel really far away,” Anpu points out, “because of the treatment and the texture”. And therefore, “painting less” becomes her mantra.

Soon, we’re figuring out the order of Anpu’s latest untitled book where she’s developed a new style of working “because I get bored easily,” she admits. Her latest book is in colour pencil, it is about a lake and “the curious things that happen in and around it,” filtered through the surreal, eerie lights of the pre-dawn.

Then, we’re carefully unfurling plastic, paint-speckled, hand-cut stencils in varying sizes. We sift through cats in many fun poses, a pixelated Queen Victoria, a beaver, a woman’s hand holding weapon, a damru, a punk pig, the crated full moon, a squirrel, a rooster, and so on. It’s endless pieces of stunning work bursting out of every corner of Anpu’s studio – cupboards, drawers and folders. “I’ve been quite prolific, no? I’m just patting myself on the back,” she laughs. Follow Anpu’s practice here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.