A Life in Art

Sivam Selvaratnam was one of the great visual artists of Southeast Asia. Thanks to an excellent initiative by Sutra Foundation and the National Visual Arts Development Board last year saw the publication of A Life in Art, a definitive study of her work from the 1960s until her death in 2014. Her final painting, Curiouser, adorns the cover of the book.

Sivam was a pioneer and active member of the influential Wednesday Art Group, when her interest in figurative drawings and abstract forms was nurtured. She then studied fine art with emphasis on textiles at Manchester College of Art and Design before moving to Singapore and working in art education. Her early artworks are based on plants and nature studies which were the main source of inspiration for her textile designs. Later she was inspired by the music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan and her body of work centred on sound and movement in colour and form. This marked the beginning of her fascination with the parallels between painting and music. In A Life In Art, artist-curator Sivarajah Natarajan and guest writer Cyril Pereira organised a selection of 200 works from Sivam into categories such as nature, sacred geometry, gerimis, textile (including batik on silk), the Colours of Rain series, jewellery, figuratives (including Manchester nudes and her 2010 self-portrait), chroma, and the subtle resonances of musical interludes.

A towering artist, now recognised in a beautiful book, and our copies are thanks to the genrosity of Sevam’s husband, the economic historian Viswanathan Selvaratnam.