In Pictures: Painting Chennai Red – One Inch at a Time

A Chennai group called Paintbox is painting the walls of the city, bringing performance art to the street.

If one were to go around Chennai, one would find it quite hard to miss sudden bursts of colour, in the form of brightly painted walls across the city.

A contrasting welcome, compared to the usual movie posters and florid party slogans plastered on walls. Paintbox, a Chennai-based organisation of four members has been slowly colouring the city – inch by inch.

Started a few years back by a group of professionals, all they wanted to do was bring performance art to the street, says Hari, one of the group’s core members. Every weekend, the team meets up at a particular location in the city and paints the walls – often with the help of citizens who pitch in.

We have people from four-year-old kids to sixty-year-old paatis (grandmas) coming and painting with us. We began with our own walls in Nungambakkam, Nandanam and Guindy.
– Hari

Started by Namrata Ramaratnam, Tejas Ramaratnam, Hari Haran and Eshwar Kaushik, the team claims that it doesn’t go through the hassles of getting numerous nods for permission to paint the city.

“It’s our space, it’s our Chennai, we just go out there and start painting,” says Hari. Although they’re left alone most of the times, Hari admitted that if they were ever asked to get permission before embarking on a project, they would do so.

The Chennai Corporation seems to have taken strongly to what Paintbox is doing – so much so, that they approached the group to team up with them on a Clean Chennai campaign.

The group accepts outside help, but only in kind. “When people offer us money, we ask them to buy us paint instead,” says Hari, explaining that the initiative has been mostly self-funded apart from help from localites.

Then again, it’s not just painting walls that the group dabbles in. Paintbox has also teamed up with Prakriti Foundation to depict poems through paintings on walls.

We always identify the main players in a society. We get poems and then depict them on walls.
– Hari

One such session was conducted by the group in Guindy.

So, next weekend don’t be surprised to see a group of people crowded against a Chennai wall. Maybe it’s time you got yourself a paintbrush and painted the city red.