An artist who was stuck in a world of emptiness returns from the edge

Thiruvananthapuram: A pass-out from the Fine Arts College, Vincent S, was working hard to forge his career path when one morning he felt a piercing pain in his heart. Life would never be the same again. He slipped into a state of unconsciousness. For 20 years, his days were filled with stillness. His memories blurred, and his body wasted away so badly that whenever he could walk, “it was like a dry leaf caught in the wind,” as he says it. He thought he would die, but he came back.Three decades later, Vincent is displaying his collection of paintings from the 1980s till the most recent years at Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan.The paintings mirror the phases the artist has gone through in his life. “I was starting to make a mark as an artist. Doctors told me I had a heart attack, but I lost consciousness. When I woke up again, I wasn’t the same person,” says Vincent,67, in slow, scattered words, as though still rummaging through his memories, hidden somewhere.His wife, Vimala, who stood by him through all these years, had tucked away the works in a corner of his house. A few months ago, Vincent took them out and gazed at those paintings like a stranger. The edges of the frame had been devoured by termites. Whatever was left, he chose to display as such. It seems symbolic of his life, half eaten away by an ailment.“I thought I was dying. But after years of suffering, I came back, thanks to the treatment of my doctor, Kalady Parameswaran Namboothiri. I don’t know if it is a rebirth,” he says. “I was afflicted with typhoid frequently; I couldn’t eat. We were so poor that I had only a pair of clothes. My body was nothing but a bundle of bones,” he says. Vincent completed his master’s at the Fine Arts College when he recovered. “It was such a struggle. I just couldn’t remember anything. I read a lot, though,” he says. Vincent, who didn’t even leave a stroke on paper for two decades, worked feverishly over the last few years, churning out works at a pace that was justifiable for a man who wallowed in emptiness for a long time.His works from the formative years are of dull tonality, mostly dealing with humanity. Hues become brighter and strokes sharper in his recent works, where the artist dwells on far-pressing concerns of the world; a world that had gone past him, silently and unknowingly, for 20 years.S M Ranju, who is curating the exhibition, says Vincent’s paintings reflect his distress. “Yet for him, art is not a solace nor an escape from the haunting reality. The works are replete with fire, guns, bones, and, along with them, distorted human figures,” says Ranju. The exhibition will conclude on January 14.
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