A narrow flight of stairs in an old building in Coimbatore’s Five Corners neighborhood leads to a small studio filled with paints, brushes, bundles of canvas, a wooden easel and finished and unfinished paintings arranged in boxes along the wall. “I don’t like cleaning,” mutters artist V Jeevanathan. The paint splatters on the fallen sheets on his table look like works of art themselves. If given a chance, the 69-year-old artist, who was recently honored with the Kalaimamani Award by the Tamil Nadu government, would love to spend his days locked in his room doing abstract art.
But life has other plans for Jeeva.
“I hardly have time to work on the paintings I envision,” he says. “These days, I mostly work on assignments.” These are sketches and commissioned illustrations for magazines, newspapers and book wrappers. Jeeva is known for her realistic paintings. He started out as a cinema banner artist, following his father N Velayutham, who founded Cine Arts in Coimbatore in the early 1950s. “Appa trained at the Chitra Drawing School in Nagercoil, our hometown,” he says, adding that the school, which is over 100 years old, continues to train artists even today.
“I made Rajini as dark as he was in real life, adding blue and brown colors to his face,” he says. Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Velayutham was offered space inside the Royal Theatre, Coimbatore, where he painted cinema banners as large as 10 x 25 feet. Jeeva, named after the communist leader, watched in amazement as they worked. The way he deftly moved the brush across the banner, bringing the faces of popular actors to life in a matter of minutes, as if he knew their features by heart… Jeeva understood it all.
When his father passed away, the company naturally fell on Jeeva’s shoulders. He had no formal arts training – he studied political science and trained to become a lawyer. Jeeva just took her father’s brushes and paints and got to work. Painting came as naturally to him, like walking or cycling. Soon, Jeeva finds herself drawn into her father’s world – working on 10 big film banners a day with tight deadlines. But he enjoyed it. “It was like bodhai,” he says: an addiction.
Jeeva broke away from her father’s traditional, straightforward style and incorporated modern colours. Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
He broke with his father’s traditional, straightforward style while incorporating modern colors. “I made Rajini as dark as he was in real life, adding blue and brown colors to his face,” he says, and he will sign his name in his trademark style below. Soon, people took notice of the new artist in town. His popularity grew among people who came to see him painting at a workplace in the same neighborhood.
But one day, everything ended.
“Digital flex boards came out in 2005 and our lives changed overnight,” he recalls. He waited for six months and finally took the plunge into digital. For someone who gave up building a steady career for the love of art, digital work was like “forcing a sculptor to drill holes in an amikkal”. But he had to do it.
A Cinema Banner by Artist Jeeva | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
He continued to paint portraits and work for books and even wrote film reviews for magazines. KalkiAnd still contributes to magazines today. his book thiraisailaiA collection of essays on cinema that he wrote for the magazine KitchenHe received the National Award in 2011.
Jeeva considers his 47-year stint as part of Coimbatore’s Chitrakala Academy, which organized art exhibitions and free Sunday art classes, as a defining part of his life. “We were the first to organize art exhibitions in the city, when such a concept was unheard of,” he recalls. “We kept going even when we had no visitors.” His Sunday art classes gave birth to a generation of artists who are now doing well in fields like art direction and design. “The Kalaimanani recognition was probably for my work with the academy,” he says.
He is a lover of the city that gave him everything. “I’ve walked every street of Five Corners, rode my bicycle across the city with my father as a little boy,” he says, adding that he knows the city like the back of his hand. He regularly posts photos of the city on social media. “I have more than 5,000 of them,” he says. He has seen Coimbatore change; Its roads have widened, flyovers have sprung up on once quaint streets.
A few minutes before our meeting, he is sitting at the computer downstairs in his studio, working on a sketch. “Was being attracted to art a blessing or a curse?” “I don’t know,” he says, laughing in surprise. They have fame and success, but they would not call themselves commercially stable. “Art rarely provides everything to anyone,” he says.
Working alone inside a dusty building in a commercial area of the city, his heart in the studio upstairs but his mind on the computer in front of him, Jeeva fits the label of ‘indifferent, anxious art genius’ perfectly. is he happy? “I’m not,” he laughs. “But I’ll keep painting.”
published – November 05, 2025 03:38 PM IST