C. N. Karunakaran
Indian artist (1940-2013)
C. N. Karunakaran (1940 – 14 December 2013) was an Indian painter, illustrator and art director from Kerala. He was the chairman of the Kerala Lalitakala Academy and a recipient of several honours, including the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi Award, which he won three times. The Akademi honoured him again with the fellowship in 2005.
Biography
C. N. Karunakaran was born in 1940 at Brahmakulam, a village near Guruvayur in Thrissur District of Kerala. He contracted typhoid while he was a child and the complications from the disease crippled him in one of his legs. Through most of his childhood, he was undergoing ayurvedic treatment, because of which he could not pursue academic studies. His formal training in art was at the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai where he learned under such as D. P. Roy Choudhury and K. C. S. Paniker to secure two diplomas; one in design and another in advanced painting.
He stayed in Chennai after his studies, making advertisement films and working as an art director in a few Malayalam films. In 1970, he shifted his base to Kochi where he became involved with Kerala Kalapeedom (Kerala Institute of Arts). Here, he had the opportunity to interact with a host of like-minded people such as M. V. Devan, Kanayi Kunhiraman, A. C. K. Raja, Namboothiri, K. P. Soman, M. K. K. Nair, C. N. Sreekantan Nair, M. K. Sanu, Pattathuvila Karunakaran, M. Thomas Mathew and T. Ramachandran.
“C. N. Karunakaran” enters the record as indian artist (1940-2013). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Karunakaran, Indian and artist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“C. N. Karunakaran” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Karunakaran, Indian and artist provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5006727. VIAF identifies the subject as 61174701. The Library of Congress control number is no99012744. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 2013, 2005 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “C. N. Karunakaran” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.