Wall art in Thiruvananthapuram featuring bougainvillea blooms merging into a smiling face grabs eyeballs

Bougainvillea-adorned portrait of a smiling girl on a roadside wall in Thiruvananthapuram turns heads and goes viral

A smiling girl flaunts her hairdo resplendent with pink bougainvillea. The girl, painted on the roadside facing wall of a house at Thirupuram on the NH Bypass 66 in Thiruvananthapuram district, has been turning heads for a while now.

The house, Santhosh Bhavan, belongs to Santhosh Kumar, an entrepreneur, and the eye-catching art work has been done by freelance artist, Manoj Kumar S, who is Santhosh’s childhood friend and neighbour. The portrait of the girl has been done in such a way that it appears as if her windswept hair is adorned with flowers and foliage. Her smile and twinkling eyes add to the beauty of the work set against rows of eugenia plants.

Santhosh had planted the bougainvillea in his garden, close to the roadside wall, six years ago. “My wife Rekha found a twig of bougainvillea in a garbage dump near the District Collectorate. It eventually grew into a sturdy plant with the pink bracts and blooms, spreading across the wall on to the road. We put up an iron frame for support and pruned the plant in such a way as to form a canopy. That’s when I got this idea of drawing a face on the wall, the inspiration being a picture I saw on Pinterest,” says Santhosh, who runs a cafe, Sara Susans, adjacent to his house.

The present portrait, done with acrylic paint, was made a few months ago. “The first portrait was done some three years ago. That face was different from the present one. But it faded and so he wanted me to redo it. We decided upon a different shape for the face since the entire plant had tilted a bit, so too the foliage and canopy. The new work had to complement the shape of the whole structure,” Manoj says.

He took two days to complete the work. “I have been doing art work in pre-primary schools where I usually draw cartoon characters and faces that appeal to tiny tots. So it was quite natural for me to select a happy face for this art work,” says Manoj, a self-taught artist who has been primarily doing graffiti for political parties and various organisations, under the name of Drisya.

Written close to the painting is Prakrithiyum manushyanum othuchernnappol (When Nature and man came together), emphasising how life and art are connected to Nature.

Santhosh says the first painting did not get as much attention as the present one. The latter went viral on social media handles. “Vloggers and photographers keep posting about this work. Several people still turn up for photoshoots, especially pre-wedding shoots,” Santhosh says.