At the centre of the Lalit Kala Akademi gallery sits a large sculpture of a metal head with golden jaguars leaping out of it. “Have you heard the song ‘Always on my mind’? That’s what I call this one,” says its 76-year-old creator, artist Thota Tharrani. “I’ve always wanted to own a Jaguar. Never could afford the car. So, it’s always on my mind. Simple.”Tharrani is a straight shooter. What he sees is always what you get. Nothing more, nothing less in every one of his paintings in ‘Thota Tharrani: A Retrospective — 1969 to Present’, an exhibition which is on at the gallery till the end of the month, his 135th show to date, celebrating 60 years in art.“That’s Forces,” he says, pointing to a large canvas of thick dark swirls of acrylic. “I was in Delhi in 1978 when a freak tornado hit. That was what the world looked like to me at the time. So I painted it as I saw it. Until that year, I did only figurative art. The tornado made me try my hand at abstracts,” he says. “And that’s Sivaji over there,” he informs in the same monotone, pointing to the far end of the room.Wait, what, where, you wonder as you look around for a portrait of either the Tamil actor or the Maratha ruler. Instead, you find the painting of a feisty rooster.“Sivaji was my rooster,” says Tharrani with a rather nostalgic look in his eye. “I grew up with roosters, and had names for all of them. Unfortunately, my mother cooked one of them one day. I was upset because I felt she had cut up my creation and I refused to eat it.” But then he admits sheepishly that the sulking didn’t last long. “You see, my mother was a terrific cook.”That sense of attachment is why he often refuses to sell his work piecemeal. “I prefer to sell my collections as a whole. That way, I don’t feel like I’m losing something. On some days, I sit in the midst of my paintings in my garage. I don’t mind at all that they haven’t been sold.”Excerpts from an interview: Rajasthan, Ganeshas, Varanasi, forces of nature, Christ, scripts, Morocco … over the years, you have had so many muses. The 280 works on display at this show are not even a fraction of the number of paintings you have done over six decades.I have found inspiration in so many subjects that even I struggle to recall how many. Music for instance, has been a muse. There is a series I have done called ‘Symphony’, inspired by composers such as Vivaldi and Beethoven. When I heard it, I found that amidst the layers of bass, there is the sound of a violin that runs sharp and clear through the piece. That was the inspiration behind my distinct, sharp yellow lines amid the dark abstract base.One of my earliest muses was the junk in my house. I pencil-sketched everything I saw around me, a broken chair, leftover thatch, cracked vessels, anything piled outside my house. I made more than 40 drawings until my mother asked me, “At one time you told me to throw away all this junk. Now you’re sketching them!”Then one day, years later, a woman came asking for work for a children’s charity, and I gave most of my sketches away. I have only three of those original pieces left. Those drawings were the only memories I had of that house. Now I have very little left to remind me of how we lived. Do you finish one series before beginning another?I see it like the menu at home. On Monday, you eat something, then something else on Wednesday and Friday, then work your way back to Monday’s dishes. There is no fixed order. It’s the same with my muses. If you look at my work in periods of five or ten years, you will find the same subjects running through them.I might be painting Rajasthan in watercolour and suddenly switch to something else. After one or two paintings, I might change again. I have half a dozen subjects that I return to, and each series has at least 40 paintings. If I start painting something, I don’t stop until it is done.(Tharrani studied art at the Govt College of Fine Arts in Chennai. He studied printmaking in Paris in the 1970s, where he created more than 1,400 spot drawings on the city) So much so that you postpone everything else?I haven’t cut my beard and hair in years. I said I would shave it off at Tirupati, but I’ve been painting so much that I keep postponing the trip. So the hair and beard have been growing and growing. Now, no one will recognise me if I shave. It looks like this will be my look for a long time. What is your medium of choice?Easy. Whatever I can afford at that point in time. When it was only pencils, I did pencil sketches. Then came the more expensive watercolours and acrylics. You also make wooden sculptures.Yes, but I do not sculpt in wood. I collect pieces of scrap wood and put them together until a shape forms. That’s how I got the Hanuman sculpture. I work with whatever is discarded. Cinema has brought you National Awards (as art director for ‘Nayakan’ in 1987), the Padma Shri in 2001 and, in 2025, France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Which do you prefer, cinema or painting?I never really liked art direction. It was something I had to do for the money, and because my father was an art director. But cinema also helped me move between subjects. I would go away, work on a film, but always return to my paintings, which is what I love. Despite AI and computer-generated imagery, you still insist on drawing by hand.Nothing can replace what the human mind can do. That is creativity. I still sketch by hand. For me, it is better than anything AI can do. Why have you restricted photography at the exhibition?People have copied my paintings before. But I believe art is like a good curry. People may copy the recipe and change the garnish, but it won’t live up to the original. Still, I am not going to make it easy for them by allowing photography.
