A Brief Hour of Beauty

A month short of his seventh birthday, Edmund Thomas Clint dies. The only son of MT Joseph and Chinnamma Joseph, the boy leaves behind a whopping 25,000 paintings that he created during his short lifetime. From chalks to crayons to water-colours, Clint used every possible medium to create drawings and paintings that depicted the world as he saw it, leaving art admirers and critics stunned at his maturity and convinced about his artistic genius. Despite suffering from a debilitating kidney disease at the age of three, Clint relentlessly created art on themes as deep and intense as death, solitude, and love. Confined to his room most of the time, Clint gazed out of his bedroom window and communed with the slice of nature he could see. He yearned for visions that lied beyond. Pleased with his devotion, perhaps Nature unlocked the truth and treasures before his meditative eyes. She inspired him to draw for hours together, often deep into the night, and sometimes until daybreak. A Brief Hour of Beauty is a moving account of Clint’s life, the world he lived in and how he celebrated them both through his art. Author Ammu Nair captures the brilliance of Clint’s craft and traces his life and swift evolution as a master artist from the very beginning till the end.