Ilike being uprooted. I don’t want to be tied to anything. Even if I land in an uncomfortable situation I don’t feel low, because I believe that brings out best of creativity hidden inside me,” says 33-year-old artist Anpu Varkey, who along with German graffiti artist Hendrik Beikirch painted a gigantic 6, 080 square feet mural of Mahatma Gandhi at the Delhi Police Headquarters, ITO.
Portrait artist and street painter, Anpu actively participated at the month-long St. Art Festival held in the City recently. As a part of the festival, she along with Hendrik transformed a small photograph into a mammoth mural painting.
“I had a genius master to work with,” says Anpu. “It took five days to paint the wall. We used to commence our work at 7 in the morning and continue till dusk,” she says. According to her ‘a beautiful machine’ called ‘ginie boom lifts’ helped her finish the painting on time. “It is a mobile elevated work platform which is used by street artists to paint large-scale murals,” she explains. “It made our work easy, manoeuvring and navigating became easy with it. After the day-long work, we used to stand at the mosque, right across the police headquarters to see how the painting was taking final shape,” says Anpu.
When asked how two artists work together in sync on a single painting, she says, “I have never worked in collaboration. He would do the drawings and I used to colour it.” She praises Hendrick and calls him one-of-its-kind artist. “He has painted 500 walls across the world. Only a person with experience could have completed this task skilfully. For him it was just another wall,” says Anpu.
But as an artist, it wasn’t Anpu’s first big project. “I have always worked on a large scale. It excites me as an artist because I think there is so much to paint. You can feel the art around you. Especially, street art as it makes you think large and tests your creative instincts,” she says.
It has been almost a decade since Anpu took to portraiture and just three years since she became actively involved in street art. Anpu lived in Bermen, before she came to Delhi in 2012. “I used to run a studio there with 15 artists. From there, only I started doing small stencils work,”
she says. Today, the young artist is not only actively involved in street art but is doing a lot of other work like designing her own graphic novel, T-shirts for her friends in Bermen and lot of studio art. “I am exploring the contours of art,” says Anpu.
