His black and white universe

Who says that nothing in life is ever in plain black or white? This young graphic designer from Chennai shows you that some of the best things in life, in art can stay within the austere confines of black and white and still carry all the nuances associated with the three dimensional world. Through stark and severe black ink sketches on archival paper, K Saravanan manages to take you into a whole new world.

Pen and ink sketches are certainly not a flavour of the moment. In a world that is reeling under the headiness of colour, sketching has now been relegated to the status of a preliminary art study; it is an art form whose massive potential and impact has been forgotten. However, it is sketching that tests an artist’s perception of three dimensional space the most. 

Sketching does make for a challenging master. You can’t rub off your errors, you can’t overdo atop it and you can’t hide or mix colours. “What you see is what has been sketched,” says K Saravanan. His latest collection of black and white sketches ‘Strokes and Shades’ comes across like a reality show that explores the artistic core of the visual world.

With pen and ink sketches, billions of strokes go on to make a square centimetre of imagery. “Each of these strokes needs to be in their proper incline and strength to make for a cohesive whole,” says the young man. “It calls for a thorough attention to detail if the object is to be captured in all its fractal planes - right down to the texture of the stone, the effect of erosion, and of course, the impact of light and shadow,” he adds. Saravanan deliberately selects subjects that present special challenges. Like capturing filtered sunlight that streams into a temple cavern or the receding depths of swaying casuarinas trees, the clash of light and shadow, the impact of wind and rain on open air sculptures, the passage of time… “Capturing the stains of rain water, the damage due to erosion and the rough texture of cut rocks was most challenging”, he explains.
Intriguingly, a sense of the past rather than surreal dimensions comes to the fore when you glance at his works.  Whatever might be the time and place of the scene, the fabulous ruins of the rock cut shore temples at Mahabalipuram or a ray of light that streaks across a the vegetables piled up by at a contemporary open air market, you are always transported into a world bygone.

Saravanan uses charcoal pencils of assorted dimensions and a variety of nibs and pens to create his black and white universe.  For the granite statue of Vishnu and Garuda from the Pandya dynasty, he used a quill (an archaic gadget which requires enormous control or the ink would drip all over the paper) and archival quality Indian ink. He used 1 mm thick engineering drawing pens to sketch the temple architecture of Mahabalipuram.
Sometimes, he sketches on the spot — the sketch of Kapalishwarar temple in old Chennai’s Mylapore while sometimes repeated visits to the same spot are called for — he made a dozen weekend visits to the Chidambaram temple for getting those images done. At times, he works in reverse, extrapolating three dimensional forms from two dimensional images, such as of temple architecture he has not seen personally.

K Saravanan’s work is also about acknowledging the celebration of form in Indian temple architecture.  From Gudiyatham Village near Vellore in Tamil Nadu, Saravanan used to travel an incredible eight hours on train (to and fro journeys) everyday to get his degree in fine arts from the Madras College of Fine Arts. Having set up base in Chennai now, he is a graphic designer by profession, a yoga teacher by enthusiasm and an artist by passion, who works on his black and white sketches at night. It can only be passion for art that can prompt a person to sketch through dawn, after an eight-hour work day. The austerity and mystique of the night does leave a trail in his sketches.