CLINT AND HIS SUNSET FASCINATES VISITOR AT BIENNALE

JAN 17, 2015 I KOCHI

Q. What are you watching kid?

A. Sunset.

Q. Then why don’t you paint a picture of it and gift me?

Next weekend the kid came with an artwork. The tiny talent had reproduced the sight “in greater glory.” Predominantly yellow-orange-and-black painting of sunset.

It’s an interesting story of the kid and the born of the Artist Edmund Thomas Clint and his most celebrated work done at the age of 4, which is displayed at ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

K J Augustin, now 79 years old, fondly remembers the work and Clint’s weekly visits to his house in coastal Kochi during the late 1970s. “I used to take him around,” he says wistfully about the prodigy who went on to do no less than 25,000 pictures before his death in 1983 when he was one month short of turning seven.

Showing the dusk-time sun poised to sink in the sea beyond silhouetted bamboo thickets on the right of the frame and knots of grass below. “This is no ordinary work for his age,” notes senior artist Balan Nambiar, about the painting whose high-quality print is now on display among 60 others of Clint at the exhibition being held as part of the Children’s Biennale of KMB’14. “It is very tough and rare for a toddler to give a perspective view to a painting. One has to be a genius to do it at age four.”

Septuagenarian Joseph, who notes with gratitude the role of a late colleague G Madhavan in first spotting the talent of Clint when the boy was hardly a year old, comes with a post-script to the ‘sunset painting’ story.

“When Saramma received the gift, she asked Clint a naughty question: ‘What if I tell the world that this is my son’s painting?’ At this, the boy asked her to return the painting. Only to soon give it back, but that after scribbling his name ‘Clint’ on one corner of the work.”

KMB’14 Director of Programmes and the chief organiser of the Children’s Biennale Riyas Komu, says

“If drawing 25,000 paintings in such short span of life is in itself a major achievement, the boy’s parents too deserve credit for having stored them over the past three decades,” he adds. “The aim of the show is to proclaim the genius of Clint to art circuits far beyond his native Kerala.”

KMB’14 artistic curator Jitish Kallat describes Clint as one who had “a child’s view and a grown-up’s vision”. Bose Krishnamachari, who is president of the Kochi Biennale Foundation which is organising the 108-day contemporary-art exhibition, notes the sharpness of even some texts accompanying some of Clint’s paintings at KMB’14. “For instance, look at that work. ‘Midukkan Meen’ is the caption given to a smart-looking fish the boy has sketched,” he reveals.

Clint’s mother Chinnama Joseph reveals that the boy learned to write Malayalam by when he was two years old. “He was initially drawing the letters of the alphabet,” she adds, recalling the appetite the prodigy soon developed for reading books in both his mother tongue and English. MBA student Visakh Anand notes how Chinnamma, as their neighbour in his childhood days, would give boys of his age paintings of Clint as specimens to reproduce.

The other Clint works at the KMB show include that of vintage state-owned transport buses and peacocks in a chaotic sky besides on an artist performing ‘Thira’ folk dance — it turned out to be Clint’s last painting.