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In his Cholamandal years, Vasudev lived close to the sea. There was the continual ebb and flow of the sound of the waves beating against sands, the hush of the Casuarina trees, filtering the strong winds through their needle-like leaves, and the scratch of crab-like forms moving across the hard dry crust of the beach. The house was filled with the deep bull-frog like voices of Carnatic maestros, just as the hammers and chisels pounded on the... In his Cholamandal years, Vasudev lived close to the sea. There was the continual ebb and flow of the sound of the waves beating against sands, the hush of the Casuarina trees, filtering the strong winds through their needle-like leaves, and the scratch of crab-like forms moving across the hard dry crust of the beach. The house was filled with the deep bull-frog like voices of Carnatic maestros, just as the hammers and chisels pounded on the surfaces of the various metal plates and round brass vessels, trays and copper murals that Vasudev and Arnawaz, his artist wife at that time, created as part of the craft making activities that were an integral part of the Cholamandal Artists Village scheme. The idea was to produce an attractive, and at that time, innovative range of crafts, that would free the artists to experiment with their artistic vision, without fear of economic constraints. It was a time, when there was little, or no support at all, from the tradition bound public at Madras, for contemporary art.

The importance of being part of a vibrant artistic community that Cholamandal used to be in the 60s cannot be emphasized enough. It was a meeting place for artists, dramatists, dancers, drop-outs, poets, photographers, architects, anarchists and thinkers. Some of them have remained life long friends and partners in Vasudev's artistic journey . Whether it was designing a set for afilm , like Samskara, or Vamsa Vriksha, or much later the masks for a production of Hayavadana, written by Girish Karnad, or a series of line drawings inspired by the poems of A.K. Ramanujan, Vasudev's links with intellectual world, outside that of painting, or the visual arts, has remained a constant source of inspiration.

"I was deeply influenced by D. R. Bendre's poem, "Kalpa Vriksha Vrindavana," he says. "From then on I started reading some of the eminent Kannada writers and it's something that I have kept in touch with , one way or another, doing the book jackets for some of these writers. A.K. Ramanujan, Girish Karnad, Ananthamurthy, all these people used to come to Cholamandal. From Yayayti, I developed an interest inIndian myths and legends, which started appearing in my work. But it was the idea of the Vriksha, the Tree of Life, that slowly started becoming very important to me. It was a powerful concept that has been visualized in almost every other culture that you can think of, in some way or another. Even an artist like Mondarin was inspired by looking at the branches of a tree."

"In the 80s I developed my own "Tree of Life." To me it symbolizes sexuality, fertility, procreation, as well as our links with our past, its myths and legends, the branches spreading out into the future," says Vasudev. It was in every sense a fertile period.

The Vriksha has been central to Vasudev's artistic vision. It's gone through many mutations, becoming the "Tree of Life and Death" in the late 80s when Arnawaz passed away after a long illness. After a lean period, during his return to his native Bangalore, Vasudev resumed his work, with renewed vigour, with a series of line drawings, based on the theme of erotic love between a man and a woman, that gradually evolved into the more formal encounters that he called the "He" and "She" paintings that he did in the early 90s. Was the Vriksha finally letting go of him?

Before we answer this question it is instructive to go back to the technical changes that have accompanied Vasudev's artistic journey. In the early years of the Vriksha series, the canvas was thickly encrusted with swirls of paint, as if the tree itself were growing out of the canvas. The sensuous physical joy of building up the image on the canvas seemed to be the reflection of the reverse process that Vasudev used on his metal reliefs. Here the hard outlines would be incised in the metal, but in such a way as tom create raised wavy ridges and lines, in the midst of which would appear the dots, the striations, the cross-hatchings, the small leaf like forms, filled with all manner of granular indentations. Later on the surfaces would also be enameled. Ther is nothing that satisfies the Indian artistic sense more than surface decoration. Vasudev discovered this in his metal works. It influenced his large oil paintings no less, which despite its compositional clarity, is filled with passionate delight in decorative effects.

He also discovered the dramatic power of words, not only in the vibrant themes that friends like Karnad were beginning to unfold on the stage, using English dialogue, quite naturally mixed with classical Carnatic music and folk songs, but as an artistic motif in his own work. K.C.S. Paniker, the charismatic principal of the College of Arts and Crafts at Madras, had signaled the way to the use of Indian scripts, much as they had always been included on the murals along the temple walls, or on scrolls and cloth paintings. The rounded Southern scripts now became another source of artistic exploration. They appear in much of Vasudev's curling artistic vocabulary, sometimes in a corner, like the stylized clouds in a Chinese painting, or patterning a small patch of bed-cover, on which the main figures are just as closely entwined, in the manner of a Japanese wood-cut, or drifting in barely noticeable swirls across the monochromatic background of a large oil painting. One would like to think that the small lively monkey like forms that tumble out of his trees, at one point of time, or peer through the crevices of his drawings , are the round Kannada script that have found a life of their own.

At the same time, Vasudev was also moving away from the impasto effect of his earlier method of painting, which he found too laborious and time consuming. Instead, he devised a way in which he could suggest the same effect, by using less paint, but by combining a thin dark painted outline, with light feathery brush-strokes, that created the same effect.

The South Indian emphasis on a strong drawing line that invisibly surrounds the envelope that we call life, is an integral part of its artistic tradition.

This has been Vasudev's choice, to play with the line and make it his own. When he embarks on his drawings, the line is in full control. In his latest set of drawings, done in silver tipped ink on black, one can see his recent concerns for the environment and its abuse by mankind, expressed in a child-like manner that does not destroy the hope that something may yet be done. In his paintings, however, the pressure of using the line to define his images is less, as he allows himself the freedom to allow his brush to take charge, as it were, freeing the imagination to suggest the larger issues that currently agitate his mind. Agitate is perhaps the wrong word, for no matter how involved Vasudev might be in certain issues, the final effect on his canvas is to find them rendered in a state of equilibrium , almost up-lifted in the brilliant glow of his palette, now become darker, more mysterious , but always luminous with its suggestion of ocean blues, aquamarines and iridescent greens. "I never consciously use colour'" he says. "The painting dictates the particular mood or texture that I might want to convey at that moment."

In his latest phase the habits of a lifetime are being abandoned. The centrality of his subject matter, the tree or floating body, or head, is now abandoned for a more free flowing composition.

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