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Urban abstractions
“Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh are my inspiration,” says Konda Srinivasa Rao. And when you see his works on show at the Kalahita Art Gallery it shows. He is not the poster painter who will mend and morph Monet’s lilies or van Gogh’s sunflowers and say he is inspired by them. He uses the style and a few of the techniques of these masters and marries that to his urban landscape where he lives. Don’t step up close to his works, they are best seen from a distance where their multiple meanings come across strongly. Seen from a distance, this one looks like lilies in a lake in a Japanese garden, the overwhelming greenery of Monet’s outdoors replaced by the grey and blacks. Step up close, and it can as well be the Panjagutta flyover with the city traffic flowing under it with the streaks of the headlamps glowing like lily blooms. “My style is semi-abstract. But without any message. I just want to show my works and let the people decipher the meaning,” says the self-taught artist who paints from his imagination. The imagination never works in isolation, it flits to the past of his life in a village where he was born in East Godavari district or to the present in Hyderabad where he draws the urban streetscape. So, if he rustles up a semi-abstract that suggests a village with a streak of white acrylic line for electric wire and a pool of water for the village lake, then he uses urban symbols as points of entry into his paintings. It can either be an autorickshaw that is knocked out of shape or an equally shapeless bus. Either way, he evokes the urban landscape in the mind’s eye.
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The paintings are decipherable fun but abstract.
Urban landscape Konda Srinivasa Rao’s style is semi-abstract.