All the art you can make
On writing on the back of bills, creating on tissue papers and going out of your way to make art and find meaning.
I have an update: I’m moving into a new apartment and I packed up my books but writing a first draft on a laptop doesn’t fall under the list of things I like or am even good at. So, the first draft of this particular piece was written on the back of a hotel bill. I think it also boosts the purpose of what I’m going to talk about below, anyway. And with that, I wanted to tell my own story this time.
The past couple of weeks made me art-hungry. Hear me out. I woke up one day and declared that I’m going to make art and if that required me to be a rebel, I’d be one. Just its yesterday, I had traveled for a couple of hours on an evening trip across the city and realised how different the lights and sounds materialised to appear based on my mood. On my return, I couldn’t help but be mesmerised by the colours the lights birthed and blurred photos captured from a moving auto quickly filled up my camera roll; the trippy lights outside a hotel building, the neon greens on the side panels of private travel buses and the sound-juice of honking and hawkers on the hill-like road.
Travelling around Bangalore in an auto in pleasant weather brims you with the pleasure of being a tourist in the place you’ve started to call home for a couple of months now.
You feel the cold evening air on your cheeks, strands of your untied hair dancing with the wind and memories of a happy time warming you up from the inside. It led to me to ponder…
When the cold sets in, you need to find a source of warmth that ignites you from within, a fire that burns incessantly and rises high till you give it the notice that’s due and deserving.
That’s how I crawled my way back to art, to home.
The day of the aforementioned declaration, I drew an illustration of a humpback whale at my desk in the office - a whale with a red marker, for in this household, not having the right supplies is no excuse. I started sketching a potted plastic plant in a low impact meeting. I scribbled on tissue papers and always had a writing utensil by my side so much so that I had to catch myself before I could perform an act of mindless vandalism by doodling over the office walls.
It was almost as if I was trapped inside a claustrophobic chamber, slowly filling up with smoke and I was gasping for every sniff of oxygen I could manage to inhale. Against the fortnight that was, today seemed like a grand finale. As the suffocated house plant of me sat in her room and the downpour outside the door slowly calmed down, a recurring sense of wanting to get out, go someplace, overcame me. I didn’t bother to go through the myriad actions of dressing up. Just a glance in the mirror gave me a nod to grab a bag, the umbrella, phone and wallet and I was out the door in under a minute. My hair was alright - the fashion police weren’t gonna arrest me. Don’t tell anyone but I’m beginning to think they only exist in our heads.
I walked the streets earnestly, without a plan. I made my way into any store that remotely gave a hint that it could host art - a home decor store that offered customised furniture, an Indian handicraft shop that housed little trinkets most of which felt like something I could make too. I skipped from one decorative piece to the other going, “Ah, how wonderful! I bet I can learn to create that as well”. As my gaze landed on a clay modelled statue, you could’ve seen my pupil size shrink in urgent concentration. I needed to make something, very badly.
Butterflies fluttered around the edges of my imagination as I discovered through my phone that my childhood dream craft-store was less than two kilometres away from where I stood and you can only imagine how a soft smile and a wide inner grin never escaped me as I wandered to the store and through it. Materials to build terrariums, all kinds of paints, brushes and media, decoupage art, clay modelling tools and craft paper of so many different varieties bombarded my senses with peaceful joy. I wanted to get the store, I desired to do everything. It was strangely similar to the feeling of being able to eat it all when you had been starving. Walking back home with oil paints and a tiny canvas, I found meaning in my evening.
Thereafter, I took a walk in the woods with Bob Ross and his charismatic painter persona while getting my hands and clothes messy with paint.
This is the final piece of art that my amateur self made!
I watched as my fingers reached for the door to the smokey chamber and pushed it ajar. My legs purposefully nudged me out of it. I felt my lungs fill up with clean air again and my mind smile forgivingly... Dear art, In this race of a life across which I dart I will keep you close, come rain and thunder to fly away into the summer skies yonder. And for you, the dear friend I take, I say, go on, discover all the art you can make!