Glimpses from an older art students musing on life, art and everything in between.

 Dear …,

When I write this, to me, you are an ear, that is not to say merely an ear, but a listening ear, an understanding heart and I feel grateful that someone asked me a question with a real intention to listen after an eternity. So here I unburden, here I open up without filters and lay bare my heart.

When did I go to Art or Art come to me? Maybe it came when at the age of six Amma gave my name for a painting competition and also gave me some guidelines on what to draw. I reluctantly took part in the competition and won a prize for it. I was not happy about the prize because I hated going to the stage to collect it. Luckily for me there was another Anita who had been on a winning spree and assumed this one too was her prize. Winning competitions was never in my mind while picking up a paintbrush.

The seeds were thus sown and the lines and colors had started doing their magic in my mind. All that I could ever see in my math textbook were the images of oranges, apples, kittens in baskets or such other images used to illustrate the questions, never the numbers which I felt quite alien to. Maybe this was why years later when I saw the movie, Taare Zameen Par, I could totally connect with it.

One or two years later, Art again became part of my life in the form of my aunt who was doing a course in commercial art living with us in Delhi. Her room, filled with colors, pens, papers etc. held a magnetic attraction to me. I remember once she gave me two sketch pens, one green and another red. Needless to say I had a great time drawing anything and everything in my books. I used to observe the sketches in her books and often be her model too, although unknowingly, because she used to sketch me sleeping with limbs flung around.

My childhood memories strongly feature my mothers creations – she used to make art that was born from household materials. Once when we as children broke a glass plate, she collected all the broken pieces and made a Nataraja out of it by sticking the broken pieces on a black jute background. I remember another work she made featuring dancing elephants from pista shells, and tur dal. She was the first artist in my life and my first viewer too. She was the one who taught me to imagine my worlds.

Years then went past when I continued to doodle on basically everything , especially notebooks, textbooks… used to doodle through my college classes, later when I started working, through the staff meetings, on my preparatory textbooks. My son, to this day, talks about how I used to draw weird faces on the margins of his textbooks and once scared one of his visiting friends with a painting of tongue out Bhadra- Kali saying it is my self portrait!

Living in Kerala during the nineties, there was no way of seeing art or learning more about art unless one was in a fine arts college. Whenever there was a student strike in the college I was teaching in, I would go to this bookstore, Idiom, in Fort Kochi and literally fall flat on the quite unaffordable coffee table editions about art. They were kind enough to let me take my time looking through those books. Then chocolate cake with chocolate sauce happened in Fort Kochi with the starting of Kashi Art Café and I loved going there yet felt like an imposter wanting to step into uncharted and not particularly welcoming waters. But then, when the whole of Fort Kochi with its churches, quaint buildings, streets, antique bazaars lay before me to explore, I was a happy soul.

At one point in my life, especially during the hectic schedule of work and other mundane activities, I realized it was very important for me to paint, draw, doodle or whatever it could be called in order to keep functioning as a human being. I bought a sketch book and filled it with beings from my imagination. Then came more books, more media and more art. I was unashamedly unafraid to attempt all that I felt like and had no intention or pretension of it being anything other than a representation of what I felt or thought. In retrospective, I think this afforded me the freedom to fly free.

At a time when life took me by the shoulders and shook me till I almost broke, I turned to art. I poured myself into it not caring whether it was “good/ bad” or “high/ low.” All that mattered was it took me out of myself into a realm where nothing other than my art existed. This was my refuge, my outlet.

Later on while working at the kochi biennale, I got the opportunity to meet lots of artists, interact with them, study their work and it was quite an invigorating period even though the work itself required a lot of physical energy. Through the art tours that I conducted as an art mediator I interacted with crowds of all kinds, from international art curators to young school students to inhabitants of an old age home. The time spent with various people from different walks of life taking them through the numerous exhibits and spaces was quite an enriching experience.

Another major thing that happened to me was the art I could see during my travels. I remember the first time in Dallas when I visited the art museum, I was so excited that I couldn’t believe that I was actually standing in front of some of the works of the artists I had only read about and seen previously in books. Later on I was able to visit several museums like MoMA, Met, Louvre, Museè de Picasso, Zentrum Paul Klee, Kunstmuseum in Bern, Fondation Beyler in Basel, the Venice Biennale etc. … the thrill of seeing the works of famous artists was undeniably there, but it also made me realize that my own art is also valid.

And, you know, pushed by my dear friends, I mustered up courage to do my own solo show and it was a dream come true. The journey since then has been filled with small but surer steps with more belief in myself and I think the decision to do a BFA is part of that self exploratory quest, stepping away from societal expectations of age or gender.

I realize the more I write, more thoughts, memories come up but for the sake of brevity, I want to end this here for now, but the question continues to live in me and gain its own life. At the end of this long letter, let me thank you with all my heart for listening, and giving me a sense of being heard. I would love to take you along on my journey and share with you all that I come across in the time to come. Maybe in doing so you can find threads that connect or interest you and that would make for interesting discussions, I hope.

So until the next time I write,

Adios! Ciao!

#artandlife #artjourney #artstudent #olderartstudent