#MyThursdayThing
In April, a couple of weeks into the
lockdown, Sangeet Shyamala, (my alma mater) offered to organise online art and design
classes to be conducted by Tarini Sharma.
Tarini, the talented daughter of my very dear friend, is in her final
year of graduation course that she is pursuing from SVA, NYC (School of Visual
Art, New York City). Currently home due to Covid pandemic, she agreed to
conduct these art and design sessions with us.
Tarini, through her sessions
emphasised on many things, the elements of art, expression, composition but
most of all she emphasised on thought. She would ask what the thought behind
this work is, when we would come back with our assignments. Sometimes there was
a strong thought, sometimes not, but her question always was, what was your
thought. And once the thought was shared, she would evaluate the work basis
that, to suggest whether the work was successful or not. We looked forward to
her assignments and the challenges she was throwing at us.
On one such Wednesday evening, the
assignment she suggested was to express, visually, in an abstract manner, our
interpretation of “beautiful and ugly”.
We had time till Saturday to submit the assignment. The assignment got me
thinking at a different level. Before this, I had never paid attention to what was
it that I found beautiful and what was it that I absolutely abhorred. I had
never given value to my feelings conceptually. I had created various works of
art in the past, expressing happy and not-so-happy feelings, but never before
had I been posed this question.
For two days until Friday evening I
was just sketching in my book and thinking about these two adjectives and what
they mean to me. I realised during this time that there are a lot of things that
are beautiful around me and it is not difficult to put a finger on what is it
that I find beautiful. It was the Ugly that was the real challenge. Later, on
Saturday, when I was describing my thought process to the class, someone
commented that it was an interesting insight that beautiful is not difficult to
find or express.
So as I struggled to bring clarity
in my thoughts I started to note down what is it that I completely cannot stand
and therefore find ugly. I concluded after much deliberation with myself that
it was violence and bloodshed, lack of freedom and dishonesty and the
suffocation caused due to these, that I completely loathed. Everything else,
according to me, could be managed, but the damage caused by the above is often
irreversible. I started to paint, I wanted to complete my Ugly first. Ugly has
many layers. In art as well as in life. Think about it. Isn’t it true, the
various shades of grey in the negative character of a story? So I started by
coating my paper with off-white and ochre shades. I began developing my work by
emotionally expressing my rising feeling of suffocation. I used a pen. I wasn’t
thinking much. I just imagined myself to be extremely angry, suffocated and
pained and expressed the same through lines. Whenever there is violence,
bloodshed, suffocation, there is also smoke, thick, dark, black, soot-filled
smoke. I wanted to capture that essence in my work. I wanted the viewer to
experience what I was feeling and my shades of black and grey came to my
rescue. I have a feeling if someone had measured my heart rate then, it might
have been very high. I worked on it till late in the night and once my blacks
and greys had dried, the work was topped with a layer of red to depict,
violence and bloodshed. I never experienced so much intensity in such a short
time. I have been working intensely before, but I realised that when a work got
heavy I would often move away for some time, take a break. However, there was a
deadline this time and my mind was full of thoughts that I had to bring out on
paper soon. It was an intense experience indeed. I had no energy to do the
other work on beautiful that night and left it for the last minute. I managed
to finish in time. Beautiful was easy. Beautiful is a light, spirited feeling;
it makes one happy and assures us that all is not yet lost.
In the class the next day when
describing the thought, I was clear as never before what exactly my idea was. I
started with the statement; “Beautiful
and Ugly” are the two sides of the same coin, aren’t they? As the class progressed we saw that
everyone’s Ugly was more beautiful, artistically speaking. Ugly was beautiful
because it had layers, it seemed more believable. Why so, I questioned later?
Was it because that’s all that we were seeing around us and hence conscious of
the layers of Ugly or was it that we were taking Beautiful for granted? I
myself do not know the answer.
See the case of the Covid-19 pandemic—on
the one hand, there is the distress of the sick, the anguish of the poor and
marginalised, the helplessness of the medical and administrative staff all over
the world, the apathy of the governments, and on the other, there is also negligible
pollution levels, clean and clear rivers, blue skies, rare birds and also a
human side of the common people who are going out of their way to help out
those who are less privileged. Wasn’t this beautiful and Ugly at the same time?
Thank you, my dear Tarini, for
pushing me to think in this manner. I agree, it is always important to be clear
about the thought behind a work. However, the clarity I achieved in the process
of this assignment took me to another plane, philosophically speaking. I think
I am still there…
©Shubhra
#5 June 25, 2020
#5 June 25, 2020
#MyThursdayThing
will be published every Thursday, on my blog https://shubhrathoughts.blogspot.com/ and shared on my social media handles.
