As a self-taught artist, Yusuf Madhiya says there were days when he made so many drafts that he eventually discarded and stopped counting them altogether.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
When a 50-year-old resident of Chennai Yusuf Madhiya went to the wildlife sanctuary as a child, he would return home and immediately start sketching tigers and elephants. Everyone around him thought he would eventually grow into a wildlife artist, but life nudged him towards entrepreneurship instead.Mr. Madhiya now spends most of his day managing his business, mostly surrounded by fabric and home furnishing materials for decades. But the artistic side of him never really went away. He says it literally did not let him sleep. Over the years with assiduous practice, he has created nearly 2,500 paintings documenting the heritage of South India, which have now become books. His painting was exhibited with The Madras Art Weekend at Lalit Kala Akademi, Dakshina Chitra and many galleries of Chennai.“After all the work at my store which has everything to do with fabric, I wanted to return to my creativity,” says Mr. Madhiya. “And from wildlife drawings, I slowly started looking at the heritage of South India when I picked the brush with my friend and artist’s influence Balanchander,” he says. There was another reason he found himself painting through the night. When his father fell ill years ago, Mr. Madhiya had to stay awake to check on him and that interstitial stretch of time also became painting hours.
