Sunil Vallarpadam will have a solo art show from August 7-30 at White Walls gallery. The show will feature his recent paintings that focus on aerial views, influenced by experiences of flight and playing soccer that made him feel liberated. The paintings depict landscapes like ponds, hills and fields from a bird's eye perspective. They are created using acrylic on small canvas boards and feature minimalistic uses of line, color and texture. The show will provide insight into Vallarpadam's artistic evolution and how he explores primal emotions through repetitive drawings and paintings.

1. AIR
SHOW #5 AUG 7th
- AUG 30th
‘Air', 20.5cm x 15.4cm, Acrylic on canvas board, 2016
Solo Show of Paintings by Sunil Vallarpadam

3. ‘The Artist of Air’ [or Reading a Hairpin Bend]
On the recent works of Sunil Vallarpadam
Sunil Vallarpadam, Artist.
Vallarpadam, Sunil’s second name, is not the name of his father or family. It is the name of an estuarine
island surrounded by the Vembanad backwaters within sight of the point of its merger with the Arabian
Sea. Sunil continues to live in the land of his forefathers.
Vallarpadam is also name of a way of Life which encompasses various varieties of plants, fish, bird, insects,
reptiles, marshes, mangroves, salty sea air, little patches of indigenous paddy, tiny inland ponds and the
cyclic rhythm of tides around which the rhythm of daily life spins. Sunil’s primary origins are from all of
this. An ordinary boyhood, idyllic too in its own way, was cut short at the tender age of eleven when his
father, a Kalaripayattu Asaan [Master of the traditional martial art of Kalaripayattu] and an amater violinist
was brutally murdered. In the years that swiftly followed Sunil’s eldest brother decided that the best way
to keep the inwardly troubled, unruly, highly creative and wayward adolescent Sunil out of bad company
and general trouble is to send him to learn art under Artist PV Nandan at his private art school.
That decision was Hammer hitting Nail right on the head.
Sunil, devoted to his new teacher, PV Nandan, took to art practice with the urgency of a gasping fish that
has briefly known what it feels like to be thrown to the shore. Art practice became a form of heartfelt
saadhana that brought discipline, order and focus to Sunil, the being and to his lifestyle. Intense concen-
tration arrived and Sunil’s engagement with his own interiority was so well established that it grew in
strength gradually causing all externalia to this one creative engagement fall away. In his case this
engagement through the medium of art practice, true to his essential nature, bypasses all sentimentality

4. and messiness of emotions and goes straight to dealing only with the elemental in terms of spirit and in
terms of language. The felt deployment of a limited repertoire of line, texture, color upon surface whose
devoted and relentless repetition engines exploration and discovery...That became Sunil’s method and
way.
Elemental …the word brings back my first encounter with Sunil in 2012. Sitting diagonally across one
another on the floor one evening in an artist’s camp Sunil closed his eyes, forgot the world and burst
into a cataract of sound in whose powerful cadence I felt the atoms of the walls, pillars and floor of the
room where I sat quiver. The song was perhaps one of the many he himself pens for his precious only
child, a daughter, setting these to very simple basic rustic folk tunes.
Elemental …the gaze of the owls and monkeys in his huge paintings of primeval forests in his solo at DH
Hall Art Gallery, Ernakulam I visited thereafter in 2014. Not so many myriad separate creatures as so
many manifestations of an elemental singularity that is the single sustaining force of Life …Praana.
It was after a long lapse that I visited Sunil’s studio with a bunch of young students at Vallarpadom this
year. It was so full of paintings that Sunil no longer had any much space left to work in. I sensed some-
thing had changed for Sunil and was still intensely changing. Recently I visited him again in a small space
in an old building at Ernakulam, a professional graphics studio that Sunil’s friend, Vipin, a self-taught
artist friend uses for his livelihood and which he generously shares generously with him.
… A line of tiny canvas boards stood against the wall and on the floor emanating a blue-ash grey light
all its own, muted, like vapor… The words formed on their own inside as the change I had sensed named
itself in a single self-formed sentence of insight “Sunil! Air has entered your works! Air!“ However I did
not express it at once.

5. Now what is this Air?
Before trying to answer that let me try to articulate what is that which infallibly stirs me about the mystery
of this strange uniquely human activity called Art each time I stand before it. “What you do with pigment
and brush on surface or fingers in clay or chisel upon stone, I do with Life and the forms of Life” My Guru
had once mentioned as part of a longer explication, trying to make me understand what the essential
nature of His work is.
The Human process of Art is a mirroring of the macroscopic movements of creation through the process-
es of the gathering together of the elements, the investment of Mind and Ego while fashioning these
into larger constituents employing line, stroke, texture, color, choice of surface. Through all this the
manifestation from the realm of the Invisible into visibility and the transmutation of Energy into Matter
and Materiality is effected till such point,provisionally independent and breathing on its own it breaks off
into a provisionally complete encapsulation of energy forms and attains to the status of a completed
work. But creation is never done, never finished. The impetus of the Desire that is its seed knows not
satiety nor rest and the Artist goes on and on with her/his work.
Now let me come back to the question -What is Air?
Air is one of the five elements that constitutes the manifest universe, all matter. Of Earth, Water, Fire, Air
and Space, Air stands second only to Akaasa or Ether or Space in its Power and Subtlety. According to
Ancient insight into the nature and potentialities of Body and Matter, Air, when brought under control as
Breath, has the capacity to liberate the being and endow her/him with the experience of freedom and
expansive unboundedness.The little blue-ash canvas boards with the warmest color in them being some
tiny streaks of mauve and the darkest, black are mostly aerial views of what seem to be ponds, canals,
flatlands, hills, fields that give one a sense of flight.

6. ‘Air', 20.5cm x 15.4cm, Acrylic on canvas board, 2016

7. It was in 2010 in a chance work at an artist’s camp in Palakkad where the theme was Agriculture that the
aeriel view suddenly entered as a compositional device to aptly answer a genuine expressive imperative,
which was to to pay homage to the vast rolling tracts of fertile green once common in our home state.
But post camp it disappeared again into some mysterious recess and the sensation of flight that had
already come to Sunil in 2008, took eight whole years after its sudden single work surfacing in the 2010
camp work to completely take over & creatively rupture his otherwise fairly earthy repertoire of work.
I will share here three of Sunil’s own insights in his own words as to the process by which this may have
happened. One, was the viewing of a Hollywood film ‘Home’ in 2008 that Sunil experienced as a mes-
merizing possibility, an aerial journey of the planet; Two, was an opportunity that same year to fly to
London on the generous invite of some friends who had thoughtfully ensured that Sunil got a window
seat all through the trip. Of this experience Sunil says- ”It reiterated to me that all our differences exist
on at Ground level or viewed from Ground-Up. But from Sky-Down, no differences exist. Everything is
but a serene and harmonious design of pattern, texture and color. “
Three, I found in this comment from Sunil a most interesting account of the intense interiority of an
experience all of us who have played a sport or danced forgetting everything else might have had,
sometime or the other in our lives, especially in childhood, where the Body becomes the medium for an
experience normally considered to be beyond its ken- “I used to get invites to play local soccer matches
in Vallarpadam’s little clearings that served as our playgrounds. I have this predilection for performing
almost dance like stunts stretching my physical capabilities to the maximum each time I got a chance
with the ball. What I could accomplish with one plain, simple kick I raise to another level flying in the
air, spinning, pirouetting taking a header sending viewers into the same rapture as I was in myself!”

8. The heady sensation of gravity defying flight, feeling that liberating sense of control as one's spine
undulates and limbs rhythmically splay in an experience of of force and balance …The instant when Self
opens out to sky beyond the bounds of Earth slows down to an eternity that sometimes permeates even
one's dreams for years afterwards. “An old painting I did of light free airborne figures with contorted
bodies, a large quadriptych using four 3ft x 4 ft canvases, called Streetside Players in 2007 stemmed from
this ...” He explains.
The stacks of drawings on the floor of Vallarpadam’s various arboreal and aquatic birds and the owl
series employ the simplest of drawing devices –arc, dot, line, simple hatches interspersed in space and
dictated by an inner rhythm.
‘Streetside Players', 122cm x 366cm, Acrylic on paper, 2007

9. ‘My Bird’, 12’’ x 18’’, Acrylic on canvas, 2016

10. In the Owl series the owl form has been repeated over and over again like a visual incantation of the
Sahasranaamam or 1001 names of a chosen deity, the pronouncement [drawing] of each name [form] a
new arrival at and a fresh discovery of a self-contained meaning that takes one beyond the bird ‘owl’.
Each incantation dredges out newer or rather older and older layers, the grappling with Primal forms of
Fear, Angst, the Feel of Dark and Night, the presence of soul newly disembodied in the loneliness of
Death, the sensation of Cold, Bereftness, Rain… of Woman as an emblem of some ancient impersonal
archetype of fertility and opening… Drawing becomes a means of arrival and centering upon a deeply
embedded psycho-spiritual axis that churns and churns throwing out newer and newer combinants.
That way Sunil’s work process in a very simple and basic way bypasses the realm of human sentiments
and its trajectories of social affiliations and commitments.

11. “When I draw and draw and draw, it is like slowly entering Dream and then suddenly falling deep asleep;
There Sunil Vallarpadam ceases to exist. Sometimes in the course of the emergence of some one particu-
lar form there is a sudden waking from that Deep Sleep. A moment of breakthrough that has shifted me
suddenly to a new hitherto unknown possibility within my imaging, a new aspect not glimpsed before. It
is only when I have woken up fully and normally and joined other viewers as a viewer I realize what has
happened. Then Sunil Vallarpadam, as if with two heads instead of one, looks at Sunil Vallarpadam!“
The drawing of the two headed owl is one such moment of Aatma Bhaashanam that literally means
Speech of Soul [a meaning that its English translation, ‘Monologue’, simply does not quite render the
resonance of.]
Who speaks? Soul.
To whom? To the embodied being who through specialized practice
in travelling into inner space attains a rarified state where the stuff of
Mind and Body, mutually permeable, are mingled together in a state
of semi immateriality, like some sort of a highly sensitive colloidal
transmitter…
Who knows where this could lead? Or in this state of affairs, so
removed from what is the norm or ‘normal’, as to what could
happen next?
(Bottom left to right)
‘Owl series', 21cm x 30cm, Acrylic on paper, 2016

12. Oh, it takes a lot of courage, persistence and forbearance to withstand these long travesties through
unknown places in utter solitude, to not give up or fall on the wayside to be eaten by the vultures …
Once these words, I now see in retrospect as happening in 2010-11, appeared as a scribble in the
margins that I had no inkling of having written. Perhaps it came as I was completing a body of work of
my own then. I had totally forgotten about them till a friend resent it to me recently. I choose these
lines to end this note on Sunil Vallarpadam who has been brave and kind enough to share a sensitive
ongoing change of course in his work with me and with everybody through a solo showing here at
White Walls:
“Imagination/Human/and all too bound by the cataract of time/is an intimation sometimes/of things to
come. /
Imagination/ when/glimpsed by that Eye before Time/is a grasping of what/ has already come “
[‘An Artist's Note’, 2010, Radha Gomaty]
Radha Gomaty is a visual artist trained at Faculty of Fine Arts,
Baroda and Kalabhavan, Santhiniketan. She is a Poet, an Educator
and also runs an all- women rural upcycling initiative called
SangMitra that creatively re-works Textile waste.
Radha Gomaty
August 2016

13. Born on 1971, Ernakulam, Kerala
Awards
Kerala Lalithakala Akademi Honarable Mention 2001
Kerala Lalithakala Akademi State Award 2003
Kerala Lalithakala Akademi State Award 2016
Sunil Vallarpadam
Painter
Group Shows
2013 Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Ernakulam
2012 David Art Gallery, Cochin
2012 Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Niraporul, Ernakulam
2011 Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Ernakulam
2009 David Hall, Fort Kochi
2008 Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi
2008 ISHKA Art Gallery, Ernakulam
2007 Sane, Lalithakala Akademi, Ernakulam
2007 Art the edge, London
2006 Orthic Creative Centre, Ernakulam
2006 Black rose, Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi
2005 Suryakanthi Art Gallery, TVM
2005 Kumali Lalithakala Akademi, Trissur
Solo Shows
2016 Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Ernakulam
2015 Durbar Hail Art Gallery, Ernakulam
2015 Madhavamenon Art Gallery, Kodungallur
2005 Aurodhan Art Gallery, Pondicheri
Camps
2016 Poomala Art Camp, Trissur
2014 Lalithakala Akademi National Camp, TVM
2011 Casino Hotel Willington Island, Ernakulam
2011 Ahalia Heritage Village, Palakkad
2009 National Painter's Camp, Spice Village,
C.G.H Earth,Thekkady
2008 Lalithakala Akademi Nish TVM
2007 National Painter's Camp, C.G.H.Earth, Mararikulam
2006 Orthic Creative Centre, Ernakulam
2006 Lalithakala Akademi, Regional Centre, Chennai
2005 Lailthakala Akademi, Kumali
Private Collection
India, U.K, France, Germany

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White Walls
2016
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