"Chameli Ramachandran has a very distinctive style of painting. She combines her Santiniketan sensibilities with her Chinese cultural heritage in her work. Chameli was born in Santiniketan and was named by Rabindranath Tagore. Except for a two-year interlude in China, Chameli grew up in idyllic Santiniketan, studying at Patha Bhavana and Kala Bhavana. She responded to the spirit of nature, its varying rhythms, its blossoming and wilting, its growth and decay.
These impressions molded her ways of seeing. Chameli started painting seriously in Delhi, decades after she left Santiniketan. In the 1990s, after her children left for higher studies abroad, she resumed painting. She began with the plant life in her garden and the trees in her neighborhood. She had some Chinese ink that she used as her medium. These early monochromatic works, with their blacks, whites, and grays, combined both lyricism and drama, which carried on to her later works as well. The rolling waves of the Arabian Sea crashing on the shore at Thiruvananthapuram are fine examples of this.
Memory also played a role in some of these black-and-white paintings. A canopy of Sal trees, seen as a young girl while attending open-air classes as a student of Patha Bhavana, surfaced in a painting years later. The painting still evokes a sense of wonder at a magical visual experience from all those years ago. Other studies of foliage and trees evoke a rich sense of poetry."
- Ella Datta
