On the tip of his tongue lie beautiful paintings

KOCHI: Painting is not an easy task. Anil Varnam, a talented artist from Kollam, with his unique style of painting stand apart from his contemporaries. Paint brushes were not just the weapons of his art. Instead, he used his own body parts including tongue, chin, foot and elbow to make wonders on the canvas. 
Anil serves in the field of teaching at Lords Public School, Karunagapally. Ani is currently running an art school for more than 300 students named ‘Varnam Chitrarekha’.

A mastery of watercolour painting, he uses mediums like acrylic and oil painting on his works. He has done paintings of Last Supper on an 8x4 canvas in a record time as an attempt to enter the Guinness book of world records. He used his tongue to paint Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. A big collection of landscapes and portraits including Sree Narayana Guru, Swami Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and Indira Gandhi are also made by him.

“I wanted to adopt a different style of painting”, Anil says on taking up such a method for his artworks. The artist also make two paintings at a time. His passion and love for art overtake his concern on health hazards that might affect his tongue while painting. The 36-year-old artist painted 1,238 paintings using his tongue and 17,000 paintings using his brushes. Anil says  “Tongue painting is a hard task”. He keeps a narrow gap between the canvas and his eyes during tongue painting. He also closes his eyes during this time. He has done modern art, character portrayal and religious paintings.

Art lovers from England, Japan came to meet him and record his demonstration. Nowadays  Anil uses only tongues for demonstrations. He says that though he took a unique art form there was never any encouragement from the authority side. The media fraternity from Japan honoured him with an award, which contained a decent amount, he added.

He mentioned that some of the students whom he taught the basics of painting have turned into good artists. He says “To sustain a family, good artists are forced to shelve their talent and look for other jobs. To create good paintings, an artist will have to devote his entire time to that. But the situation here is not favourable,” he says.During this artistic career spanning 22 years, he has achieved numerous awards. He received the State award for painting in the year 2000. The world honoured the artist with prestigious awards like Guinness World Record for tongue painting in 2008 and Universal Records Forum (URF) in the year 2016.