Jagesh Edakkad has heard several stories about his home town Edakkad, near Thalasseri in Kannur district. However, he could never relate to some of those stories as he could not understand the landscape mentioned in them.
But they made him curious to know how Edakkad was in the past, and what made it the town it is now. ‘Glance from the Past’ is the result of his quest to sketch out the Edakkad of yore.
The exhibition of drawings and paintings by the artist is on at the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi Art Gallery in Kozhikode. “I heard from old people in the neighbourhood about paddy fields that used to be there and houses without compound walls. I have brought in all that in these paintings,” Jagesh said.
He has also tried to bring in the rituals and figurines of yore into the paintings. “I have heard stories of ‘Kothamoori’ and ‘Pottan’. These days, nobody cares about them, and even if someone tries to restart the tradition, they are laughed at or frowned upon,” the artist explained.
Out of the 11 paintings under the title Glance from Past, only five have found place in the exhibition owing to space constraints. Keeping with his attempt to experiment with different mediums, the artist has tried pencil on tea-washed paper to reflect the image of a sepia- tinted village from the past. A few of his paintings from his earlier series ‘Budding Cosmos’ have also been displayed at the show that concludes on October 31.