Aishwarya Ramachandran likes tigers so much, she even falls asleep thinking about them. “It’s funny,” she laughs, “A couple of months ago, I woke up from a dream of ‘riding’ on a tiger’s back.” The artist has no idea how the dream came to be, but the corners of her mouth tug at a smile, at the thought. One of the senior students at Ilango’s Art Space on Harrington Road, Aishwarya has spent the last year immersed in one tiger pastel piece after another. Before this, she graduated in Biomedical Engineering from Arizona, and even went halfway through a PhD. But, the tigers were calling. And she couldn’t stay away for long.
“So far, I’ve got 60 (tigers on canvas),” she reveals. This is apart from the 30 paintings that were sold at a solo exhibition sponsored by WWF last year.
So what keeps her drawn to the same subject with every painting she does? “I guess because there’s something very powerful about a tiger, that I don’t see in any other animal,” Aishwarya responds with her back turned, as she shuffles through some of the tiger pieces that she has kept aside for the photoshoot. She turns around for a moment and pauses, “They’re lethal, but at the same time flamboyant, you know?”
Glancing at her many versions of the Bengal tiger, it’s hard to disagree. The focus is always on the tiger, never on a jungle backdrop. Set against block colours of copper sulphate blue, orange and greys sit proud members of the great Indian tiger family. Dangerous fangs mid-roar, two sleeping brother cubs, one on top of the other — one even has a tongue sticking out and larger than life gleaming green eyes guarding her four young.
Intricate strokes to make each hair of fur probably take a long time to get right. “It’s about five days for a painting,” she says nonchalantly. “Say five to six hours a day.” Also, she adds that keeping it as close to the real thing has been her mantra for a while now. “So I haven’t taken creative liberties with psychedelic coloured fur or settings outside its natural habitat,” the 28-year-old explains. “Since I’m still using reference images to get the detailing perfect, my focus has been on that alone,” she adds. Although, her next tiger is bound to take a leap away from the rest. “It’s going to be a motion painting of a tiger running straight at you,” Aishwarya says excitedly.
For all her passionate depictions of this jungle creature, Aishwarya has no one experience to pinpoint when her fascination began. “I don’t think it was any one place in particular,” she admits. Then reminisces, “When I was a kid, I would look out for tigers on TV.” Even in the zoo, years later while in college, there seemed to be a guiding paw leading her to the nearest tiger in sight. Not an elephant, not a lion — only tigers. In that case, we reckon, she won’t be painting other animals any time soon? “What can I say?” she laughs. “I just can’t get enough!”
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