Rosmi Thomas
Now painting Rogue's Ground — a series of works drawn from the novel by Toms Varghese Koottunkal.
Rogue's Ground
“Every soul down here is an untold story.”Vakka — Rogue's Ground
This series takes its people, places and objects from Rogue's Ground, a novel set in Kerala by Toms Varghese Koottunkal. Each painting is a way of telling one of those untold stories.
The novel is told from Themmadikkuzhi, the neglected corner of a Kerala churchyard where the parish buries those who died outside its rules — a man who hanged himself after a small quarrel, an atheist schoolteacher, a lover who walked into the backwaters. Kept off the consecrated slope, they keep each other company at a low wall and remember what nobody official ever wrote down.
Rosmi paints these scenes in abstract form, in oil and acrylic. The book's characters, objects and incidents become shape, colour and texture rather than illustration — Mathai's skull-bowl of peanuts, Vakka leaning out for holy water that never lands on him, the coir spinning wheel, the flowering cross, the hill across the lake carried away truckload by truckload.
Beneath them run the threads that hold the story together — the camaraderie of the outcast dead, the inequality that decides who lies under marble and who ends up in the heap, the quiet power of a parish register, and the slow work of forgetting.
About the novel →Works
The series is in progress. New paintings are added here as they are finished.
About
Rosmi Thomas began painting in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic kept her at home. What started in those months of seclusion became a practice of its own.
She is self-taught, and paints in oil and acrylic. Her work moves between portraits, scenes of village life and abstraction.
Her current series, Rogue's Ground, takes its subjects from the novel by Toms Varghese Koottunkal.
Contact
For enquiries about the series, commissions or exhibitions.
[contact email]