Kesavan Appukuttan Achary (12 June 1925 – 31 January 1997), known as Appu, was an Indian painter and sculptor and one of the pioneers of the Indian modernist art movement in Bengaluru. Appukuttan had the rare distinction of being one of the few Indian artists with mastery over both sculpting and painting. He won national acclaim for his ivory sculpting, becoming one of the youngest persons to receive the National Award for master craftsmanship in ivory carving for his work, Chola Queen, in 1965. He won a number of Lalitha Kala Akademi awards for his work across classical and modern painting and sculptures. His versatility is evident in the mediums he worked with and the range of his subjects. He drew sketches with ink. He painted using a palette knife to produce rich broad strokes. He sculpted with stone, wood and ivory. He modelled with cement. A number of his ink drawings have been included in Pratima Kosha - an encyclopedia of Indian iconography - published in VI volumes by the scholar Professor S.K. Ramachandra Rao and published by the Kalpataru Research Academy. Appukuttan's book, Rekha, a practical approach to traditional motifs and forms, was a result of his desire to share his vast knowledge and experience to others in the field of arts and crafts.
Appukuttan's works - as a sketch artist, painter and sculptor - were rooted in traditional art but branched out to embrace modernism over time. His oil paintings are expressionist, sometimes bordering on abstraction. Some of his wood sculptures have drawn comparison with the works of Henry Moore. As a craftsman he was totally traditional; as an artist he was free of tradition. He was attracted to modern art for the freedom of expression that it afforded him. He is one of the few artists who was able to balance the traditional side of his creativity with the modern.
Besides being a prolific artist on paper and canvas, and a sculptor using various mediums, Appukuttan Achary wrote in various journals and periodicals, and also scripts for dramas.
Early life and family Appukuttan Achary was born on 12 June 1925 at Karikkakom in Thiruvananthapuram District of Kerala, India, into a family of artists, sculptors, dramatists and musicians of the 'Achary' community of Kerala. The Achary community of Kerala are craftsmen who excel in carpentry, woodcarving, ivory carving and temple design. They claim descent from Vishwakarma, the divine architect of the gods. He inherited a cherished legacy of generations of craftsmanship. It was, therefore, only natural that he be proficient at traditional arts. He had a general education at a local school and learnt wood carving and sculpting from his father, Kochappi Achary, a well-known sculptor and a musician.
When he was 16 and had successfully completed school, his uncle, Ramankutty Achary, a well-known ivory sculptor, introduced him to carving in that most delicate of mediums - ivory.
Appukuttan joined the Rama Varma Drawing and Painting Institute at Thiruvananthapuram to learn the essentials of form and line in drawing. The rhythm and fluid expression for which Appukuttan's work became known can be traced to the short period at the Institute. He completed the course in crafts for the Madras Government Technical Examinations. While the artistic environment he grew up in helped initiate him to the traditional field of art and craft, his student days at the Rama Varma Institute - where he studied drawing and painting - strengthened his academic base and honed his native talent. This phase probably laid the foundation for, and gave him the courage to branch out into, the abstract and modernist idiom. Speaking about this phase in his life, Appukuttan said:"It is absolutely essential to have a command over the medium that you have chosen. I believe a strong academic background is a must for artists. Thorough knowledge of technique and a clear understanding of the history of art through formal education are vital prerequisites for any artist. I grew up in a family where drawing and carving were common. My father was popular for his temple designs and carvings in the traditional idiom. In the circumstances, I could have ended up as just another talented craftsman. But a rebellious zeal to break new ground and a need to do something original and meaningful resulted in my becoming a creative artist."
Artistic career After his stint at the Rama Varma Drawing and Painting Institute in Thiruvananthapuram, Appukuttan joined the Ivory Manufacturing Centre in the same city to work as master-craftsman at its workshop. His years at the Centre were more in the nature of gaining experience. In 1958, All-India Handicrafts Board appointed the young artist as a master craftsman and artist of South Indian temple documentation in its Regional Design Centre at Bengaluru. His years at the Regional Design Centre gave him the necessary exposure to various craft forms and also helped him specialize in different crafts. He even taught image-making in wax to craftsmen of the manufacturing unit of Cauvery Handicrafts Emporium, during his stints there on deputation.
The style and subjects of his work
Appukuttan's works, seen over time, show how his roots in classical styles formed the foundation for him to express himself in his later works in the modernist and abstract styles, fusing form and lines to convey the same messages in the depth that abstraction based on immense experience reveals.
Mythology, the life of the common man, the evils of the caste system, and nature were at the heart of Appukuttan's works. The helpless, the downtrodden and the pitiably wretched were subjects close to his heart. He portrayed not just the bright side of life but also the darker aspects of human existence. Pervasive melancholy suffuses some of his images and ideas. The repertoire of his works is visually loquacious, works drawn on deep wells of feelings, myth and metaphor.
Appukuttan was a humanist, and the human was one of his dominant themes. To him the human figure was a vehicle of expression rather than a model. In his portrayal of the human situation, by and large, he took an optimistic view of life, emphasizing the happy, contented moments in daily life at home, on the wayside, and in the fields. It is not an ecstatic vision of life, but a mature and composed one. He acknowledged the inevitabilities of life, and being intensely in love with humans, when he depicted those aspects of life the result was heart-rendering and poignant. The bonds that exist within the family - especially the most powerful bond that exists between a mother and her child - were central to many of his works.
His themes on the life of the common man are simple, everyday happenings in villages and towns, and come out vividly through his impressionistic abstracts. The harvest season, village folk hurrying to the market on a bullock-cart, the Kavadi festival and the bullfight are some of the works on village life. More than landscape or other natural themes, it was human figures that interested Appukuttan. His works are invariably full-figure compositions chosen from daily life such as laborers at work, street singers, fakirs, fishermen, bamboo fiddle vendors, musicians, etc.
Regarding his human subjects among the common people, Appukuttan said: "These are real people. I feel deeply for them and sympathize with them. In that sense, these drawings are neither contrived nor meaningless essays."Given his roots in traditional art, one of the distinctive features of all his works is the decorative design carried out with conspicuous skill. Appu improvised each work of his by the feeling of the moment to tell a spicy tale, at once moving, direct but yet impersonal in its appeal.
Appu's works symbolize restraint and intelligent ideation blending harmoniously with a realistic technique. The onlooker is not confronted with any puzzling phenomenon and the subject of his art is transparent and eloquent in its expression and theme. There is no nonchalant splash and flourish of loud colors in his oil paintings. The whole technique is gentle, expressive, clear and subdued. His complex, multi-faceted sensibility immediately and consistently draws one to his works - be they paintings, sculptures in wood or models in cement. The diversity that it reveals - which is the source of vitality and essence of all major art - is a result of Appu's refusal to be bound by conventions. Like most modernists, Appu pursued an individualistic line of approach. His works reveal that he looked as much to mythology as to a sort of psychoanalysis for subject matter. Many of his works based on mythology depict a deeper and more general spirit of a myth as directly and dramatically as he can. There are others where his deeper understanding and interpretation of the symbols can be experienced by the viewer in the flux of hushed paint.
Ink drawings
Drawing is the basis of all craftsmanship and Appukuttan Achary was a master of drawing. Appukuttan Achary, the craftsman, started from the point where artists like K.K. Hebbar left off. A majority of the drawings in the six volume Encyclopedia of Indian Iconography, Pratima Kosha, written by the scholar, Professor S.K. Ramachandra Rao, are by Appukuttan Achary.
Appukuttan considered good drawing the basis of good art and true to his conviction, underlying every painting and sculpture by him is draftsmanship of rare strength. His emphasis on draftsmanship did not make him a traditionalist. Rather, his idiom was very much modern. His distortions and streamlining of form, for instance, were always purposeful, serving to invest his subjects with a new meaning. Even when he abstracted, the overall recognizability in naturalistic shapes is not lost.
In his foreword to Appukuttan Achary's book Rekha, the writer and art critic Krishna Chaitanya wrote:"Our old architecture, especially the temples, are great treasure of forms with a surprising range of stylistic variety. A hieratic tradition, basically conservative, may preserve the icon through the centuries without much variation of the main contours of the form. But even there, the details vary considerably. Coronet and tiara, necklace and waist-band, bangle and anklet, are in many styles although they all may be equally decorative. Even a simple thing like a sacred thread can describe different rhythms, sweep in different undulations, over the torso. Systematically, Achary has given helpful guidance about the hidden measure and geometry behind the sensuous incarnation of the iconic form, proceeded to the mudra or the gesture of the hands which in this country has become a very expressive language on its own, and then gone on to the hair styles, ornaments, etc. In the same helpful manner he has covered figurations of animals, foliar and other decorative motifs. A most valuable contribution is his series of drawings that bring out the distinctive stylistic qualities of a number of schools like the Chera, Chola, Pandya, Hoysala, etc. Though he has mainly confined himself to the traditional repertoire, his superbly simplified drawings indicate the creative mutation illustrated by his own artistic career and will enable others also to adopt traditional drawing for modernist sensibility without rupturing the links with our great heritage."
Oil paintings
His oil paintings showed his remarkable versatility of subjects - figures, landscapes and abstract forms of line and color. His fine aesthetic sense is apparent in his color combinations, spacing and compositions. Appukuttan did not use the brush but, instead, used the palate knife. The strokes were bold and the colors bright. There is a harmonious blending of colors and objects in all his paintings, giving them a pleasing and natural effect. His canvases are distinguished by great feeling for colors in depth which contributes to their rich atmosphere. And his predilection for sober colors matches his mature vision of life.