For the love of landscapes
City artist Narendranath Palala’s romance with art began in childhood when he would carry the art works of his father and his artist friends on his bicycle to the gallery. “Those days, organising a show was such a huge task,” recalls the son of renowned artist Dr P.R. Raju.
Narendranath, a national awardee like his father, brings a unique set of characteristics to his works. He works with various oil media, but doesn’t use a brush and sticks only to the palette knife. This renders an additional texture to the strokes of his paintings. Texturing and colouring are the two important components in Narendranath’s works. Texturing is achieved by the layering technique and the colours are chosen very carefully keeping in mind the lighting. Although the artist deals with a wide variety of subjects from people to animals, his forte and passion is landscapes.
“Landscapes are challenging as you have to keep in mind the lighting and bring to the canvas the exact colours that you see in the nature,” he says. His landscapes show a clear distinction between the fore ground, middle and background. While Narendranath was fortunate to have art in his bloodline, he recognises the need to initiate a new generation into painting. With this in mind, he is now conducting a workshop for children who are interested in landscape paintings. “The children are very interested in replicating landscapes. It’s interesting how they get confused with the colours. They sometimes ask, ‘how many greens are there in green?’,” he smiles.
Even though he leans more towards landscapes, Narendranath’s non-landscape paintings are also impressive. The subjects are people he meets while travelling. Among all his works, a portrait called ‘Holy Man’ stands out for its portrayal of the physical weakness and vulnerability of old age.
“The key to painting people is to be able to get the character of the person to reflect through the physical body. For this, I generally interact with my subjects before I start drawing them,” he says.