— Dr Sreekumar Padmanabhan, QP Medical Officer, and artist


By Anand Holla
 

As a Medical Officer at Qatar Petroleum (QP) who tends to offshore emergencies and outpatient cases, Dr Sreekumar Padmanabhan’s work life is strenuous enough to make him promptly switch off his creative brain once he hits home.
However, on most days of the week, the General Physician who also happens to be a maverick self-taught artist takes to the large, white canvas, waiting at his home, with the chirpy enthusiasm of a morning jogger at daybreak.
“Until I complete a painting, I feel a bit restless,” Padmanabhan says, lounging at his New Salata residence, “Somehow I want to finish it. But if I rush through it, I know the end result won’t be great. So I must take my time, too. The happiness I feel when I complete a painting, I can’t express it in words.”
While Padmanabhan’s success as a well-qualified doctor has followed a social narrative, his coming-of-age as an artist is deeply personal. Having made a mark in Qatar’s art circle, Padmanabhan has held a bunch of small-scale exhibitions as much as his humility would permit, and is often invited as a judge in children’s drawing competitions.
“I love doing this,” he says, several times during the conversation. He prefers to call painting his passion than a hobby, and that’s how he relates to it as far back as his memory can take him. “I think I started drawing,” he says, before correcting, “scribbling… from the age of three.”
Padmanabhan’s earliest memories of growing up in his native place in Kollam, Kerala, India, involve him as a four-year-old attending a one-month art class under a tree that bore “beautiful seeds”, and visiting a circus in town. “Soon after, I would draw animals whose names I couldn’t even pronounce,” he says.
To encourage his self-propelled art streak, his school’s principal and founder would gift him with painting sets on whichever occasion they could find. “It was my way of expressing joy. I would paint so much that every classroom of the school had my painting framed on its walls,” Padmanabhan recalls.
The latter part of school turned his focus on academics than art. Once he joined college, images of landscapes, animals and flowers were replaced by faces.
“In college, I began drawing portraits of Indian film actresses like Sridevi, Jaya Prada, Shobhana, and Anupriya, who would be featured in magazines. My mother Sushama, too, was a yesteryear actress in Malayalam films, and so was my late grandmother Mavelikara Ponnamma, who used to be a famous character actress and a stage performer. So I would often ask my mother to pose, and then draw her,” Padmanabhan says.
Through his medical college years, Padmanabhan won big at youth festivals all over Kerala with his poster painting, clay modelling, and caricatures.
In 1997, Padmanabhan, as a general practitioner, moved to the UAE — Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah — where he lived for a decade before moving to Doha. “All through those years, I wasn’t exploring art much. I never thought painting to be a big deal as I always did it for my satisfaction.”
But a big deal it certainly is, and the gradual process of artistic self-discovery sprung a few surprises on Padmanabhan. “I used to pick a photo and try to paint exactly like it. So my watercolour paintings appeared opaque, not transparent. Only recently, when I attended an exhibition of watercolour works of Translucence by Indian artist Sanjay Chapolkar here, I learnt of the magic of this unique, transparent effect,” he says.
Even for his experiments with acrylic, it took Padmanabhan several “flop paintings” to achieve significant proficiency. “Until last March, I was so content with acrylic that I would wonder why anyone would bother with oil painting,” he says, smiling.
That eye-opener came with his random check-in at a workshop organised by the Fine Arts Association in Katara. “I rushed back from my offshore duty in Halul and pleaded with the organisers to take me in as the batch was already full,” he reminisces.
To his utter horror, an Arab gentleman at the workshop told Padmanabhan that everybody had to paint in oil. “I had no idea how to use it,” he says, chuckling, “He gave me a photo of a bland building — which I would never paint as I was into portraits — and I had to paint it using oil paint.”
“You won’t believe how much of an utter flop it was,” he says, shaking his head, “I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t go back to that workshop.”
However, Padmanabhan took this crashing disappointment, too, in his stride. Next, he tried finding someone who could teach him but it wasn’t to be.
Like each time, he then immersed himself in his own assays at oil paintings, aided somewhat by YouTube videos for mixing colours and nailing nuances. “Ever since I started last September, I have completed four,” he says, confidently, “The fifth and the sixth are on their way.”
So how did he learn? “I keep making mistakes and keep learning from them,” he says, “If I don’t like the way a painting has turned out, I keep redoing it until I am happy with the result.”
Padmanabhan’s modus operandi for painting portraits needs a real image to start with. “Since I have no formal training to get the anatomy and proportions right, I prefer some assistance. At times, I mix and match and add some imagination into the frame.”
One of his stunning oil-on-canvas works is of a sleeping child left behind in the temple grounds to beg. The actual picture was shot in Kerala by a Doha-based sports photographer Bijuraj.
For a lot of his artsy excursions, though, he relies on the in-house models — his wife Hema, and sons Arjun, 16, and Dhruv, 9. Once, Padmanabhan asked Hema to stand in a corner of the hall with a lamp and took a picture of her. A compelling painting of that picture now adorns a wall of that hall.
“However, I haven’t yet captured any of them perfectly. I am still working at it,” Padmanabhan says, allowing himself a laugh.
The whole place is splashed with his paintings. The corridor by the stairs of his sprawling residence holds a painting of Hema seated with the Taj Mahal in the background. Pointing at it, Hema jokes, “It’s nice that he has added all those ornaments on me in the painting. But I haven’t still gotten any of them.”
While he finishes acrylic works
in two days — from the time he finds after work and gym — oil paintings take time. “Every day, whenever I get time, I paint,” he says, walking into a room on the terrace that he has turned into his makeshift art studio.
Even when Padmanabhan travels abroad with his family, he loses himself in museums and art galleries; be it at The National Gallery in London where he spent half of each day for two straight weeks or their recent holiday in Italy.
“You see the works of the greats and realise you are nothing,” he says. Given how keen Padmanabhan is to meticulously examine art works and imbibe from them, it’s not surprising that he calls stalwarts such as Sir William Adolphe Bouguereau, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, Godward, Leighton, Waterhouse, Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Reynolds, Tiepolo, and Kerala’s legendary Raja Ravi Varma, as his teachers.
Yet, for all his drive, Padmanabhan hasn’t ever sold his paintings. “Perhaps, I never thought they were good enough for people to buy. As an artist, I can’t rate myself more than three out of 10,” he says, rather self-effacingly, “Also, a lot of my paintings are personal. I didn’t know if people would be interested in them.”
The only exception was many years ago, when a European lady patient saw a painting in his Dubai clinic and loved it so much that she wanted to buy it. “But I didn’t sell it. I made another one for her,” says Padmanabhan, “That’s because I don’t really want to part with my paintings.”
Now, the time finally seems right for Padmanabhan to sell his works. “I’d like to do something for charity,” he says.
That shouldn’t be too difficult as at the heart of Padmanabhan’s paintings lie sincerity and simplicity. “There’s too much confusion and chaos outside. That’s why I like to draw a boy who is happy to have his puppy by his side. I want my work to translate simple emotions.”