Meet Indian artist who is madly in love with pencils

Dubai - Abu Dhabi-based Vinayan Vasudevan is a self-taught artist with multiple skills

When artists love to take up brush and paint, here is an artist who is deeply, madly in love with pencils.
With little exposure to the thriving art world in the UAE as well as his home town, Vinayan Vasudevan, an Abu Dhabi-based Indian expat from Kerala, has a wide collection of pencil drawings, which can easily be misunderstood as paintings.
The self-taught artist is an interior designer by profession, qualified in civil draughtsmanship, but his jobs vary from drawing portraits to setting the interiors of houses and office buildings, including hospitals and hotels, in the UAE.
Now at 45, he has done several paintings, most notably an oil painting of Shamshir Vayalil, founder and managing director of VPS Healthcare; acrylic portrait of Abu Ali Ibn Sina, renowned Islamic thinker and philosopher in the Arab world; pencil-graphite drawing of Zaha Hadid, the British-Iraqi architect; and innumerable caricature drawings of Indian leaders and celebrities, including former president APJ Abdul kalam and friends, but not relatives. 
He is also trying to use pens to draw caricatures, which is very trendy these days.
While his artworks adorn walls of Dubai Hospital, many schools and houses of several Arab nationals, his interior visualisation skills are evident at flydubai office in Dubai, renovated Deira Fish market and Warwick and Metropolitan hotels.
He said the school managements in the UAE and Arab nationals have a penchant for sceneries, which makes him busy besides his office hours.
Seeing his artistic excellence, sometimes, employers also give him special assignments. "I never mix it up with my office hours. I draw whenever I get free time. The best part of being an artist here is, we get all quality materials, which give the desired results,' said Vasudevan. 
Like any other expat, financial issues back home brought Vasudevan to the UAE first in 2002. He returned to India in 2007 and worked with a top real estate group based in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. After five years, he returned to the UAE and joined a Dubai-based company. One year ago, he joined the company's Abu Dhabi office. 
"You may wonder, I am working as an interior designer of a company and how art can have a place in that field. People like me are essential from the scratch of a design as we draw sketches as per the demands of the clients and guidelines from the team of engineers and architects. Once the structure is finished, I have to give suggestions for furniture to be used inside the building as well as the arranging them in an artistic manner."
Vasudevan is nurturing a dream project nowadays: A three-metre high oil painting of the seven Rulers of the Emirates in the backdrop of the UAE's gradual development, which is now at par with any wealthy nation in the world. He is preoccupied with this ambitious project and spends his spare moments on getting the right design.
And ask what is he using to sketch it?
"Yes, it is pencil. I am not just crazy about pencils, but in love with them." 
nazeem@khaleejtimes.com

• UAE
• Abu Dhabi
• Dubai