Rieugleen R
clickety-clack..the sound of a typewriter is back to back in the Wee hours when the senator Robert F Kennedy got assassinated.
In the end, a stunning portrait was achieved while releasing the clutch from the platten. It was the Portrait of Robert F. Kennedy which was drawn by the artist, AC. Gurumurthy as an artistic tribute to the US Senator. It was his first drawing on a typewriter and he sent it to a leading Kannada daily and it also got published. AC. Gurumurthy was living in Bengaluru.
Artist A. C. Gurumoorthy
He is a person who incarnates things such as world prominent figures, birds and animals with the typewriter keyboard and creates incredible 3D pictures, by artistically aligning the keys and applying various pressure on them to attain various shades. He sketched more than 500 oil paintings, 300 watercolours and Indian inks. There are few typewriter artists in the world whose drawings are in the basic designs but he is the one who made exemplary portraits resembling the exact photograph of a person. In his career of more than 50 years, he had drawn 1000 Drawings with the typewriter and he had 5 typewriters. Earlier he studied Bcom and LLB and worked in IOB Bank and the reason he got a banking job is because of his artistry and the credentials he holds.
Portrait of Former PM Rajiv Gandhi
The craze over the art made him take voluntary retirement from his job. He started drawing five hours a day as if he was going to work. He limned various leaders such as Dr Abdul Kalam, our former Chief Minister Jayalalitha and Mahatma Gandhi. In that, he completed Gandhi’s portrait within an hour. In 1998, he had drawn the portrait of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and sent it to him.
After that, he received that portrait with the autograph of Rajiv Gandhi. “It was a proud moment of my career,” he said. The places that he visited are also an inspiration for his astounding pictures.
shilabalika
One such place is the Chennakeshava temple, popularly known for its prodigious pillars where there was a sculpture of ‘Shilabalika’ found on a pillar, it took him eight days to draw. It was his favourite painting. While drawing on a typewriter, even if something went wrong, the artist has to pick up the sheet and start drawing on a new paper again. But he said that he had never taken out paper in his career, as it was an amateurish one. The use of colours in the typewriter will prolong the workload. So, he paints his drawings using watercolour to flourish them.
While drawing on a typewriter will be a daunting task itself, each of his paintings contains themes such as illusion that remains arcane. 
He was going to display his works in an exhibition after this pandemic. Apart from this, he was an athlete at a young age. He was also interested in photography, Photo framing, photo lamination, photo collection and film development. For this, he owned a studio in the ’90s. Now he is a full-time artist and he hopes to soon find a place in the Guinness Book of Records with his inverted images waiting for publication because it will be the world’s first upside-down drawing with a typewriter.Some of the Unsung heroes like him dedicate their lives to art with which the world looks cool.
Photo credit: Rieugleen R
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