K.M. Adimoolam
“My heart and mind are filled with nature, at every moment. It is a wonderful experience; this love and awe that provoke my ever creative and anxious mind to penetrate the reality that lies beyond our vista. Thus, my canvases mirror my mind’s journey through Nature – not as realistic landscapes or seascapes, but planes of colours creating an esoteric aura on a transcendental level. For two decades, my concept has been evolving unilaterally with mere technical innovation and a different exploitation of hues.”
Born in 1938 in Tirucharapalli in Tamil Nadu, K.M. Adimoolam moved to Chennai in 1960 where he enrolled at the Government School of Arts and Crafts. After completing a Diploma in Advanced Painting in 1966, he began to work on a series of black and white portraits of Mahatma Gandhi. Adimoolam sketched almost a hundred drawings covering 60 years of Gandhi’s life.
In his later years, the artist gradually moved towards oil paintings, although in most of his works, he uses a combination of drawing and painting. Colours played a vital role in the journey of evolution of his works from figurative to abstract. Colour is what fascinates K. M. Adimoolam. It is this and not any specific imagery that Adimoolam uses to interpret nature, making his paintings abstract renditions of the natural world purely through colour. Focussing on the dynamics of interconnectedness between nature and people and people themselves, his works recreate in abstract conditions of what he saw and felt like while looking at nature.
M. Adimoolam passed away in January 2008.
