Ponmani Thomas

Born

Education
She graduated from the prestigious Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts(CAVA)Mysore, and has been awarded by the Kerala State Laltkala Academy twice, once with honourable mention and the next time with the award itself.

Exhibition
Ponmani is a self proclaimed colourist and primarily a landscape artist. Her landscapes have a strange resemblance with Goutam Khamaru’s paintings of animals. They verge on the decorative, just stopping short, and take on the dense wild character that is typical to the landscape of her native Kerala, which has ingrained itself into her psyche. There is a propensity in Ponmani to use a lot of curved lines in her paintings; it is akin to a feminine force, a centripetal movement of elements, like – dancer’s curved arm gestures. The parabolic curve of the huge coconut leaves, or smaller mango leaves, things that the artist has grown up seeing all around her; takes on a hyperbolic surrealistic quality that make them appear more zoological than botanical entities in her paintings. Her landscapes are not soothing picturesque ones, that draws the tourists; rather they are like disturbing dreams, often verging on the nightmarish, but she offsets them with pleasant pastel colours like pretty pinks/purples, contrasting them with more intense blues or greens, placing them next to each other. Unabashedly bold contrasts – dark cobalt blue against a bright scarlet; or a crimson splash against a dark prussian blue; or a light green against a vibrant orange – imbue her landscapes with strange ambiguous light effects, that are more atmospheric and empirical than literal. Ponmani’s landscapes carry their own life force within themselves.