I count myself fortunate to have known artist Yusuf Arakkal (1945-2016) personally — he would call me “my favourite journalist friend” and he was mine and most of the city journalists’ favourite for generously giving his brutally honest opinions. “Please quote exactly that,” his cheerful voice would urge over the phone. Such generosity of spirit was showered over friends and acquaintances as well, and he was known to gift his paintings without any hesitation.
Generosity aside, Arakkal was a prolific painter, having done about 20–25 series in a span of 45 years, each series having a minimum of 20 to 30 works, depending on the scale of work. Not only paintings, he has done many sculptures and hundreds of drawings as well. Finally, a retrospective of his paintings, sculptures and drawings, which was long overdue, is going to begin at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru, on October 14. There will be about 250 works on display, comprising a selection from all the major periods of the artist, whose life had enough twist and turns.
He was born in Chavakkad, a coastal town in Thrissur District, Kerala to a royal family and led a luxurious life as a child. After the death of his parents, when he was thrown into solitude, the young Arakkal ran away to Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in search of his brother. After he failed to find his brother, he stuck around in the city, eking a living doing odd jobs. One of his distant uncles managed to find Arakkal and brought him to his house in the city.
The uncle, a chief engineer in HAL, got him a technician’s job there. Sara Arakkal, his uncle’s daughter, who later married the artist, recalls, “I still remember that teenager who was lonely at heart and full of life in his eyes when he came to our home one day in 1960s. He worked the night shifts and pursued his passion for painting during the day. Later, he joined Chitrakala Parishath College of Art and got his diploma in 1973. Fighting against the odds, and swimming against the current, Yusuf successfully established a style. He focused on figuration when abstraction dominated the art market. He unwaveringly stuck to his style, no matter what the market equation was and proved himself right, that too without repeating himself. At one point, he stopped doing the successful series 'Wheels', which had given him a prominent position in the art world, because he never wanted to be branded in the name of any particular imagery or style.” Arakkal had then explained it and said, “I was afraid of being branded as a painter of wheels, like (MF) Husain’s ‘Horses’.”
As a painter, Arakkal could take three hours to complete a painting or more than a year. He once spoke about his painting technique, saying, “A painting could well be the labour of three years. But I do not believe in sitting before a canvas and correcting it over and over again. I would rather work on 10 paintings and produce one good one.” He used thin paints and painted with a speed, which British writer and photographer Stuart Forster described as, “reminiscent of a protester daubing paint onto an advertising hoarding”. Personally, the artist believed that whenever he did something fast, he would find the results good.
Arakkal wrote prolifically as well; there is a semi-autobiography which is still unpublished; and he wrote copious essays about his painting techniques and his thoughts on art. In one, he wrote: “It is ridiculous to brand me as a social painter. It would be utopian to think that my paintings could be responsible for the eradication of poverty or suffering or unhappiness. I do not go searching for themes. All I do is expressing what is around me. What really inspire me are people. When I paint, I paint the individual and his problems.”
One of his hard-hitting series was on pavement dwellers — he had lived on the streets when he ran away from home — and the children he painted, even urchins, always had toys and a smile on their faces. Then there was a series he did on people living inside large pipes. He wrote: "It is a common occurrence in our country and I have even witnessed a wedding being solemnised in a pipe near my house in Bangalore."
P Surendran, art critic and writer from Kerala, who has studied Arakkal’s works closely, has observed, "Yusuf’s vision was that while creating a piece of art one should also consider the common man who knows nothing about the academic dogmas. It was this philosophy that made him select themes from the lives of the marginalised. This made an outright change in his attitude.”
Some of the paintings displayed at the retrospective come from a significant series called My Book of Reference (2002). Arakkal had travelled extensively — his first travel abroad in the '80s started his collection of travel drawings — and held several master artists in high esteem. In the series, Pablo Picasso’s goat sculpture appears in a painting, Emile Henri Bernard’s nude women taking bath appear in another, Edvard Munch’s nude girl sits on a coir cot, Joseph Bury’s felt suit hangs on a wall, Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti woman makes an appearance and so does Picasso’s famous Guernica appear in a painting which, Surendran notes, has its basic provocation from the 2002 Gujarat carnage.
Arakkal’s famous sculpture, made from his beloved Jeep, will be on display. The Jeep sculpture is bedecked with copper motifs taken aptly from his Wheels series.
Some of his uniquely rendered portraits, of Mother Teresa, Amitabh Bachchan, Michelangelo, and Sara’s father, will be showcased and so will the drawings portraying 135 artists. A few of the works are from the collections of his collectors like the Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, gallerists Gita Maini and Dr Pramila Baid, and cricketer Anil Kumble.
Sara will be playing a 25-minute video featuring about 30 people who were impacted by Arakkal’s friendship and generosity, from his old gallery in New York City, A.I.R., American art historian John T Spike to journalist Bachi Karkaria.
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