On January 12, people used various means to pay tribute to Swami Vivekananda on his birth anniversary but an artist with a team of 60 artisans has created a 60 sq feet portrait of the great man using fine seed grains like rice, wheat and so on.
The artist Satish Gurjar, in the past, has created portraits of ex-President of India APJ Abdul Kalam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several other personalities in a similar fashion.
A colourful portrait of Swami Vivekananda gets its hues out of the seed grains used on the artefact. Gurjar, leading a team of 60 artists, has created this portrait at Harda degree college in 8,000 sq ft area.
It took these youths three days and nine types of grains to complete the colourful creation. The unique art consumed over 52 quintals of grains.
The artists claimed that this was the largest grain portrait of the world following which the officials of the World Book of Records, UK, visited the city to assess the artwork.
“It’s called grain art and conveys message of Swami Vivekananda ‘Arise, awake and stop not, till the goal is reached’,” Gurjar said adding the grain later will be distributed among the poor.
Gurjar told News18.com that creating this much large portrait wasn’t easy as first. The college ground had to be cleaned and levelled. Then a sketch was drawn on carpet and later every single seed was placed manually. Conveying a message of environment conservation, the portrait did not use any chemicals.
The artists used wheat, rice, soybean, gram, urad, maize, masoor, til and other grains in their endeavour.
Madhya Pradesh Agriculture minister Kamal Patel who hails from Harda contributed in this deed by donating 50 quintals of grains.
Gurjar’s tryst art is equally interesting as his artform. A master in arts, Gurjar was preparing for civil services until in the year 2017, he met with an accident and broke his leg.
To kill time, he had started carving on his plastered leg and later after he recovered from facture, he started drawing with pencil and colours.
People turned out in large numbers to see the creation on Tuesday.
(With inputs from Pravin Singh Tanwar, Harda)