The last time you had a pencil in your hand, you might have been noting down something. But Ashwin Subramanian would have probably been drawing portraits with it. An exhibition of pencil portraits of eminent musicians, drawn by Ashwin Subramanian, was held at Gallery Sri Parvathi, Alwarpet from 20th to 22nd February 2011.
Ashwin is a Class 11 student of PSBB, Nungambakkam who is holding an exhibition for the first time. He says that two months ago, he collected Rs.4760 as fund for a painting from friends, relatives and a few wellwishers. He then went on to donate it to Balagurukulam – an orphanage.
Ashwin has been painting right from LKG, and when he was in 7th standard, he went to almost 10sessions in the Institute of Designing. His mother, who is a musician, was the one who chose this theme for this exhibition. He says he started preparing for this exhibition four months ago, when he started a portrait of Sai Baba.
There were portraits of Nithyashree Mahadevan, Sudha Ragunathan, Mandolin U. Srinivas, M.L.Vasanthakumari, D.K.Pattammal, M.S.Subbulakshmi, T.N.Seshagopalan, Mridangist Umayalpuram Srinivasan, Papanasam Sivan, T.V.Gopalakrishnan, Seergazhi Govindarajan, Violinist Lalgudi Jayaraman, Veenai Vidhwan S. Balachander, Madurai Mani Iyer, T V Sankara Narayanan, Dr. Balamurali Krishna, Flute N.Ramani, Thyagaraja Swamigal, Dr. Chittibabu (Veenai), Vikku Vinayakram, K.J.Yesudas, Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, and Ranjani and Gayathri.
The exhibition was inaugurated at 2 p.m. on 20.2.2011 by Rukmani Ramani (Papanasam Sivan’s daughter), and Umayalpuram Sivaraman, who said that his portrait looked just like him!
When asked which portrait was the most difficult to draw, Ashwin replied that it was the one of D.K.Pattammal as it was difficult to bring out her expression. He said that it took about an hour to finish the outline for one portrait. The portraits, he said, are done on A3 paper.
Ashwin says he couldn’t have put up the exhibition but for the encouragement from his parents, teachers, friends and others close to him. He has a lot of novel ideas for his future drawings. Do catch up with his exhibition when he comes up with it again, if you have missed this one!