From her hearts palette

Unfolding worlds, with kaleidoscopic view sparkling, twinkling, shimmering dew. Quotes from famous poems and those she penned herself accompany most of the paintings; this one, her own, written as caption for a painting of dew drops on green leaves. The beauty of the world that unfolds in Rachel’s kaleidoscopic view is that it is not limited by the blinds of schooling. She has never had a formal training in painting and has solely relied on the whims of the artistic genes passed down from her mother Susan Thomas. The self-taught painter, an engineering graduate all set to do her MBA, displays a  commendable mastery of the medium. Amateur as she is, Rachel’s paintings are the antitheses of wanton musings. Her passion for reading books and writing poetry shows through in the frames that capture the high and low octaves of the  natural world and human life.  While ‘Theyyam’ and ‘Silent Lullaby’ each freezes a high point in art and  emotion, ‘Bangle Seller’ and ‘Small is Beautiful’ depict the beauty of wayside sights that often go unnoticed.    She has also found her voice as an artist by evolving a signature style. She joins two or more pieces of frames to complete a single painting. In ‘Silent Lullaby’, she combines three such pieces in three different shades to complete the face of the mother to depict the many emotions that rule a woman’s heart while watching her baby sleep. The painting of Mother Teresa similarly has a frame within a frame which highlights the face of the Mother amidst the flowing transparency of the strokes that qualify the rest of the painting. “All these 31 paintings were done after this opportunity to hold an exhibition came my way. I thought that is only going to happen after I grew old and led a retired life,” laughs Rachel. From the city, where she lives with her mother, Rachel moved to her ancestral home in Thiruvalla, to create a sizeable body of work in the one month before the exhibition began. The sight of young boys playing football in muddy waters that caught her fancy during this artistic interlude is also on display. The splashing of the mud and the excitement of the boys seem so tangible that they bring alive memories from one’s childhood. ‘Adrenaline Rush’ is another painting to which your gaze gets hooked due to the perfection of the headless human form that raises the whip over the bull charging forward in the bullock race. And why is the man headless? “Every human being must have felt an adrenaline rush while going through some adventure in life. I think everybody can connect with the feeling I’ve tried to communicate through this painting. It’s each of the onlooker who is in the act, and hence the headless figure,” she explains. The pastel shades of the beach scene, titled, ‘The Crescent Moon’ after Tagore’s poem of the same name and the swirling red skirt of the ‘Salsa Dancer’ stay on in memory long after you step out of the hall. The exhibition is on at Alliance Francaise till June 24. Time 10am – 6 pm.