Emotional touch to lines and colours

IF PERFORMING arts provide entertainment and relaxation and visual art a means of self-expression to normal people, they provide much more to mentally-challenged persons. Bharatanatyam artiste Ambika Kameshwar has been using dance as a form of movement therapy for the mentally and physically-challenged children for the past ten years.

It is a touching experience to see these children undergo training at the Rasa day care centre. Dance helps in retrieving and maintaining motor nerve movements in spastics and similarly affected patients.

These children at Rasa - some of them are in their adulthood - also express themselves beautifully through colours and forms. If you are not told who painted them, you may easily believe that many of them are the creations of seasoned artists.

They may not be able to express their feelings in words, but the way they apply colours in waves, lines, circles, flowers and leaves, speaks a lot for themselves. The varied textures they have come up with using water colours, pastels and pencils have to be seen to be believed.

They mix mediums without inhibition adding to the interesting variations in textures and luminosity. They are so child-like when they show their creations to the visitors, with innocence and happiness that reflect in their eyes. The paintings are sincere expressions of their emotions - their happiness and anger - no pretensions, no masking of their true selves.

You find a great sense of movement in one painting and there is a slash right across, cutting the movement. There is a bright sun and cheerful flowers; there are fish, there are designs galore, that they could easily be used in textiles. Ultimately they are pure abstract expressions by people who have no use for words and gestures.

Over 200 paintings by the children of Rasa will be exhibited at the Vinyasa Art Gallery.

`The Magic of Art by very Special Artistes,' sponsored by Rotary Club of Madras Midtown and Vinyasa Art Gallery will be inaugurated by Sivaji Ganesan on June 30, at 11-30 a.m. and will go on till July 2, daily from 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.

LAKSHMI VENKATRAMAN

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