P. PERUMAL

Bio

Born in 1935, P. Perumal was a National Scholar in drawing and painting (1962 – 64). He served as a Fellow of the State Lalit Kala Academy (1995) and was awarded a Gold Medal (1998) at a programme by the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, Bhopal.

Perumal’s works are part of private and institutional collections in South Korea, Italy, the USA, Germany and Canada. Apart from being a practising artist, Perumal is well-respected in the field of art education, having been an art instructor at the Government High School, Chennai (1959 – 1961) and an Associate Lecturer at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Chennai (1988). He is also a recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the Department of Culture, Government of India (1988 – 1990). Perumal received the Indian National Award in 1991.

Having had spent his formative years in a village in Tamil Nadu (South India), Perumal endows the villagers; the human personalities in his paintings with what is deemed as the ‘poor-yet-happy’ state of emotion, while he effortlessly provides us with his elated perspective of the sentiments of the workforce in an archetypical village in Tamil Nadu. In his art, Perumal captures a distinct innocence and a fatigued satisfaction in the postures of the villagers that he depicts in his staple visual narrative, often insinuating a sense of promise and hope for the tired human bone.

Perumal continues to create his elucidating paintings in a corner of the state of Tamil Nadu, rejoicing in his fascinating world of rural nostalgia.