Home: Far Away and Long Ago…

#MyThursdayThing

A friend once told me that there are a cat and a dog inside each one of us. He said the dogs are attached to people and the cats are attached to places. For me, I think this statement holds because the cat in me is very attached to places. The houses I have lived in and the places I have visited and the cities I have toured. Anyplace I have stayed in for more than a few nights have often been etched in my memory. (That is also a joke in our house because it doesn't take much for things to get etched in my memory says my family, always in awe of my big fat memory)

So last month when artist, Sareena Khemka, with whom I was doing an online workshop, asked to do a mixed media project on the concept of home, homelessness, migration, etc  it got me thinking of what Home meant to me and was it this current abode where I am comfortably tucked in, in these Pandemic times or is it my parent’s house, or is it my 1^st house (when I started staying on own) or my childhood home…  The answer I guess is a little of all of the above but the most share of the pie goes to my house in Kanpur. The house I was born in and left for higher studies and kept going back to in every vacation. The house which after my grandparents passed away was sold off. The house that still comes in my dreams.

Located in a well off part of the city, our house in Kanpur was built in the 1950s by my grandfather, on a  unique corner plot. It was circular in parts and then rectangular. It had a red brick exterior on the circular part and the rest of the house in white and grey. The uniqueness had made our house a landmark for the Rickshaw guys. The way to describe our house to them often would be kone wala lal eit wala ghar(The corner, red brick house).  My grandfather was a tree lover and a fruit freak so we had about 5 Mango trees, several varieties of Lemon, Gulmohar, Neem, even a Chandan (Sandalwood) tree. There were Ashok trees, grapevines, and a whole kitchen garden in the back yard. My mother had a love for flowers and gardening and she took care of the potted plants, flowering plants, and the lawn. Between them, the place was green heaven.  My grandfather had hundreds of books and he thought all the house needed was bookshelves and so each room had shelves and shelves and more shelves. The rooms in our house had funny names, I guess like we have in all old houses. So there was as usual Dadi ka kamra(Grandmother’s room), Mummy ka Kamra (mother's room), but for some funny reason, the kids' room was called the Radio wala kamra (Room with a Radio). There was a big radio that my grandfather had and it used to be kept in that room before we were born. There was a beech wala kamra(middle room) that connected to all rooms. This room had a fireplace where we all gathered at the end of the day on a cold winter evening, where many endless story and later gossip sessions were held. The second floor was called Timanjala (a word I never heard anywhere else apart from in Kanpur). The mezzanine floor was Duchchatti, a place where only my grandfather's excess books were stored and which we all were scared of.  Even though the house was constructed in post-Independent India and with quite a modern design on the exterior, the insides of the house had an old-world charm to it acquired also by the furniture it hosted which was all brought from my grandfather's service days in Roorkee.  The most prized possession in the house was an antique indoor wooden swing, kept in the balcony. It bore witness to many secret talks and thoughts and tears and laughter, as it was the place where we sisters and cousins hung out the most when we had to do our stuff away from the elders. We brought that swing with us when the house was sold and it has a proud place in my mother’s house.

The house in Kanpur was not just a house but a treasure of memories, of good times and bad, of our childhood and our youth. It was a house I loved to go back to in every break I could get when I came away from Kanpur.  Even today so many of my dreams the house I dream of is the Kanpur house. I often wonder if we were rich enough we would not have to sell the house or how would it be if the house was still there and I could fix it and use it as my studio and home. There in that house, there were more rooms than people and the result was there was scrap collected in every room.  Now I live in a house (big enough) with so much art that this house has fallen small too and to imagine all this in that house seems dreamlike.

So when Sareena, asked to do a Home Project, I decided to give tribute to my house. The house that bonds me with my childhood, with my sisters, my cousins and my childhood friends. The house that my father nurtured along with my grandfather,  where my mother married and came to, where the three of us were born and grew up and the house that made us all cry when it was sold and on the last evening before leaving, the house I so wanted to hug and say I don’t want to leave you. 

So I went down the memory lane and took out pictures and letters and thought of words and flowers and colours and maps and made this accordion-style book collage to pay tribute to my non-living (yet alive in my heart) best friend from the days gone by. I call this artwork, Home: Far Away and Long Ago (Yet so Near...)

https://youtu.be/Mb_OkGBNbB8

My sister always used to ask me to make a painting of the Kanpur house and I had always wanted to do so too but never got around to it. I guess this home project is a far better and fitting tribute to our home. While working on this project I even wrote a poem for the house but that is for another post and another blog.

©Shubhra
#11 September 3, 2020

#MyThursdayThing will be published every Thursday, on my blog https://shubhrathoughts.blogspot.com/  and shared on my social media handles.

Drop that fear…

#MyThursdayThing

Have you ever paid attention when a child is drawing something that they see or imagine? Their version of a face, a chair, a house, a car or any scene from their imagination? Have you ever noticed the bold uninhibited lines? Their detailing, the visual stories? When was the last time you saw a child draw? Those who have kids at home or in extended family/circle would have seen a lot of art from kids, I am sure.

 I experience kids’ art very closely. For one, I have my nieces and a nephew in my family (all less than 10 years of age) but more than that I have more than a dozen kids I teach art to, twice a week.  I see their responses to an idea and how they take it to another level. Their stories and then their colours add magic to their drawing sheet.  It is sheer pleasure, a visual treat to work with them. There is a famous quote from Picasso, “Every child is a born artist” and I so believe in it. However, as kids progress in the education system, most of them shy away from the drawing that they so uninhibitedly did a few years ago. Somehow, I feel, the right and wrong, good and bad, this way and that way come in between. But the one reason I see—perhaps the single most important cause—for children to abandon art in general or drawing in particular is fear of mistakes and a loss of spontaneity.

I realised this even more so in the last two weeks, when I happened to attend a spontaneous drawing workshop by artist Gopika Nath. The 10-day workshop was conducted on WhatsApp and had exercises which were aimed at making one shed inhibition and experiment with different techniques and mediums and tools. For example, we had to draw to music with eyes closed, or we had to see video clips of dance performances and draw quick one-second sketches or draw directly with a pen without lifting  the pen from the paper, even draw with different tools other than pen/pencil/brush, like a jhadutilli (a twig from a broom) or a stone or a piece of cardboard. Whatever one fancied, one could use. The most interesting for me was drawing with the non-dominant hand and blind contour drawings.

This meant drawing with a pen directly with my left hand and also drawing without looking at the paper and without lifting my pen. These were timed exercises and I had such fun. The results were childlike and bold. Drawing directly with pen on my sketch book gave me such confidence that I had never experienced before despite drawing and sketching now for many years. The one thing that this exercise enabled in me was letting go of the fear of that line on paper. Whatever came out on the paper was spontaneous and actually the result of eye and hand coordination. The mind was asked to shut up and it was the intuition at work. We were asked to focus on what we felt when attempting the exercise. I felt one with children I teach. Suddenly I experienced their simplicity, their freedom, their intuition and their uninhibited bold strokes.

About a decade ago, I had attended a workshop on drawing and sketching with Mark Warner, someone who is considered the best in teaching the same, and I remember how he had asked us to attempt similar exercises then. I had loved the exercises even then, but I wasn’t awed by my own results.

I probably laughed at them and never saw what they were intended to make me see. Maybe I was not ready to let go of my fears or maybe I didn’t pay much attention to the lines and forms and feelings and just laughed at the crooked result. Maybe I was too caught up in the right and wrong or maybe the time had not come. I did not understand then, what I understood now. The importance of letting go of fear, the importance of attempting that which one is unsure of. The importance of discovering new lines and forms and expressions, the importance of introducing new things like these into your daily practice and then the confidence rubs off on all the different works that one attempts.

From the kids whom I teach and from the last 10 days of work, I learnt a whole new way to deal with my ideas. I learnt a lot about art, drawing, spontaneity, myself and my responses, but most of all I realised that anybody can draw.

If you can see, you can draw. All we need is to lift that pen from our table, take that paper and just draw what we see. Leave the judgement of right and wrong aside. Get into a childlike frame of mind and just draw. Sometimes with left hand, sometimes with right, sometimes without seeing the paper, sometimes to the tune of music and sometimes abandon that pen and just pick whatever you can find, dip in some ink or paints and just draw.

I am thankful to my mentors and my students (my children) for helping me finally see what it takes to draw like a child… Just drop that fear!

©Shubhra
#8  July 30th, 2020

#MyThursdayThing will be published every Thursday, on my blog https://shubhrathoughts.blogspot.com/  and shared on my social media handles.

Beautiful or Ugly?

#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

#MyThursdayThing will be published every Thursday, on my blog https://shubhrathoughts.blogspot.com/  and shared on my social media handles.