The artist who shaped visual culture in twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. Born as P.M. Sreenivasan on 19 January 1919, he took the name Silpi over a career spent producing line drawings and watercolours of South Indian temples, deities, and architecture. Most of that career happened at Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil weekly. He'd go into temples at night, after the crowds had cleared out from darshan, and sketch the sculpture directly, which meant his readers were seeing sanctum interiors most of them never would in person. The record on his life is patchy and scattered across a handful of sources.

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