Memories of his childhood days in his father’s old colonial printing press are as green as the green acrylic color stuck to his pallet knife, “Those were truly beautiful days and their beauty comes from the innocent ignorant fascination with reused printing paper, I still miss them”. Rama Suresh recalls nostalgically how he spent countless afternoons in that dimly lit printing press workshop, where on reused printing paper he used to draw figures of people, animals, temples, bridges and everything which his eyes could see and his mind could recall. This instilled a fascination in his mind about the interplay between color and paper and how it can create a real world, which gradually evolved into a passion to become an artist. Performing badly in school and rebuked now and then by his disciplinarian father, Rama Suresh found true solace and identity in painting. Initially his art teacher A. Vimalasan encouraged him to paint, later he developed a fascination for Van Gogh landscapes but finally he felt the influence of the great south Indian artist K Adimoolam, famous for his Gandhi sketches.
In the work of Rama Suresh one can find vibrant glimpses of everyday India, as he paints real life scenes happening around old temples, forts, ponds or village roads or the people talking in a group. His choice of technique, impasto, is also very appropriate for the tropical sunlit scenes of India. With the thick strokes of acrylic colors, mostly white, ochre yellow, burnt Siena, black and red, Rama Suresh brings the hues of Indian reality through portraiture of ordinary Indians, situated in the vast mosaic of a timeless civilization. Men and women worshipping Gods and trees, climbing stairs of ancient temples or the portraits of teenage girls and old women standing backside in colorful abstract backgrounds, express humans as a metaphorical entity situated in the time and space of Indian reality. Often depicting figures from the back the colorfulness of daily traditional life speaks through architecture and costumes as well as from the narrative dimension of the painting, if present. Rama Suresh accepts that this intentional element is a mark of his work as he wants to portray their cultural background, traditional costumes, ornaments, and the importance of historic places like Ajanta, Ellora, Mahabalipuram, Pushkar, and the Taj Mahal.
Rama Suresh was born in the Southern Indian city of Chennai, has attained his M.F.A degree from Government College of Art and Crafts, Chennai, and has been guided by eminent artists such as Dr. Alphonso A. Doss, Mr. R.B.Bhaskaran, Mr. C.Dakshinamurthy, Mr. G.Raman, S.K.Rajavelu, Mr. J.M.S. Mani, and Mr. Rm. Palaniappan. In his twenty years of practicing art Rama Suresh has displayed his work in over 70 national and international shows and has had ten one man shows including this past November at the prestigious Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. He has been awarded various regional and national awards for his work.
