LURU Hangs w/ watercolourist Sudha Palepu

Flowers could be the pigments of your imaginations too.

In the pandemic, while the rest of us were virtue signalling with baking, brewing, or badgering our matriarchs for family recipes, Sudha Palepu was coaxing colour from her kitchen waste. Bengaluru-based Sudha, an exhibition designer, was on a “year-long internship at a museum in Los Angeles” and got “a bit clumsy and knocked over the only bottle of red ink” in her apartment. At any other time, she could’ve just popped over to an art supplies store for a refill, but it was extraordinary circumstances then — being that it was “the first weekend of the lockdown,” she recalls on our stroll through Cubbon Park. Instead, she called one of her seniors from design school – a textile designer – to ask: “Is there anything I can get colour from around me?” With a few suggestions from her friend, in her California kitchen, she started off with “stewing some onion skins,” boiling spinach leaves and soaking black bean skins, “the ones they put in burritos” to release colours.

So, while her exploration of natural inks and pigments began as a side project “to keep sane and functional” during the lockdown, she couldn’t find red while living in LA. On returning to India, at the end of the internship, she found manjistha, “the roots that have been historically used in textile dyeing” across the sub-continent. “I finally found the red at home,” she adds.

Ink, it’s my new obsession

Back at her home-studio, Sudha shows us her experiments laid out on the tiled floor. Her practice of releasing inks from natural elements swings between researched knowledge and a knowing emerging from trial-and-error. She points to the yellow watercolours and anthotypes which “are actually palash” from this one tree in Lal Bagh. She waits for it to bloom from February to April before collecting the flowers. Soon, we’re looking at paintings made from annatto seeds, marigolds, laterite red soil from Anjuna in Goa, and manjistha. “So, this is the red that I hoped that I would find,” she reminds us. “It all started with red, it’s what set me off and then I found it when I came back to this lovely country,” she adds.

She draws our attention to a painting with a faint, fading colour. “It was blue,” she announces. “So blue is one of those rare colours because the anthocyanins – water-soluble plant pigments – which give blue, break down pretty easily, with time, when exposed to light or heat,” she explains. And I don’t know if you can very faintly see some coldness here, which was the blue,” she adds.

The array of watercolours depicting flora, fauna, and everyday city scenes are part of her “ongoing experiments” where she “either makes the ink and applies it on the paper or dips the paper into the ink” and then sees “how they age” but “all away from sunlight.”  

Sink the ink

We followed Sudha around in the park, picking up leaves and flowers, watching her rubbing them out into colourful squiggles in her notebook like nature’s crayons. We picked up and admired her watercolours that employ these natural pigments at her home-studio. And then, we watched over her shoulder while she extracted colour from a bark of small-leaved mahogany in her kitchen. “All you need to do is just put it in hot water,” she says. We watch the brown bark slowly leach its reddish colour into the water because of tannins – the same ingredient that gives tea its colour. While she eyeballs the right hue of the red-colour brew, she surprises us with details like “pomegranate peels, though bright-coloured, amazingly enough give a yellow but dries to an olive green.” “Certain botanicals need to be simmered” into releasing pigment while others like jamuns “will release their colour even in cold water” once their skins have been meticulously peeled.

“Whereas with something as tough as [the mahogany bark], you need to coax the colour out through some heat and you can see how it’s getting more orange,” she says, drawing our attention to the stove-top. She turns it off, rushes to get paper and a paintbrush, and shows us the subtle shade of red. Soon, we’re peeking into her freezer stacked with bundles of kitchen scraps. “This is how I collect my onion skins. Every time I cut an onion, it goes into this. I have avocado peels also like that, and so on,” she shows us. “Do you guys still want to go to the tree?” she asks. And we’re off, following her to collect annatto seeds for a delicious red – the shade of colour that started it all.

Keep up with Sudha’s work 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.