Paint One : Color
Being an academically well-performing student (comparatively) was the most traumatic part of my childhood, I often tell my friends half-joking. I was not interested in much beyond the written word till my teenage years, it was then that we had a tall, disgruntled, passionate art teacher. He taught us how to do portrait drawings. For the first time, drawing was interesting. A friend of mine who often failed his mid-terms did a portrait of Bharathi, the Tamil poet, with astonishing detail. The art teacher praised him, and that bothered me. I was bothered by my lack of ‘natural talent’ in drawing or painting. Then the art teacher demanded we get watercolor, and my mother convinced me to stick with my sketch pens, as she could not afford to get watercolors that month. The teacher found sketch pens an insult to the art he taught; he threw them angrily, and from the moment I picked up the scattered pens, filled with shame, I hated drawing for a long time. Maybe it was the slap, but, doesn’t matter.
After that, there were times I picked up drawing or painting. Buy new art supplies and feel obsessed with them for a while, and give up in frustration, without even thinking about what frustrated me. There was a time when charcoal felt like magic; the fact that we could draw the sun by repeatedly drawing black circles felt like a revelation about how to see the world. And I have often seen visual art, online and offline, and felt moved by some of them. But a moment of change happened when I first encountered the series of Mount St Victoire paintings by Cezanne. For the first time, the artist’s triumphs, failures, and struggles made sense to me. Here was a man who stood before his canvas and struggled, inviting us to participate in his struggle. To see, like the act of seeing, is the most revolutionary act in the world.
I recently had some money to spare and spent some of it buying oil paint. And I felt like I had discovered the difference between sketching and painting. Once an artist told me that she cannot paint for fun; I believe she meant that painting is always work for her. And in that context, I realized writing is always work for me, by which I mean, writing is something I intend to share with others as work, and hence it is always to be judged. Whereas painting felt like a craft I could practice without judgment, I was trying not to express, but to parse, to look at things, photographs, and try to reinvent them in paint. When I show them to friends, it is to invite them into life and not participate in art. I painted crows, lovers, Mother Mary and grief. I was frustrated when my lack of practice meant I could not transfer something I saw to paint. But the frustration was devoid of any anxieties, and that pleased me. And sometimes there is joy in light and color, and paint and brush.
What I wanted to tell you is that I went back to Cezanne, in the library I found a book about his watercolors, and I looked at them like I had discovered an artist who is not one of the most influential artists ever. Often his paintings make us feel like they are a puzzle, every brush stroke is a clue we have to put together and make a theory. About how to see, to see without parsing, to see without making meaning, to see without imagining. Or to parse anew, to see anew, to imagine afresh. Imagine you are seeing a painting not in a gallery where it feels like a dead body waiting to be dissected, not in a book where it is dead long ago, somewhere where you are not asked to inspect the artwork. Judge it by all means, but be judged by it as well. Because Cezanne placed himself on a scale where he judged his apples and was judged by them.
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Green, Brown, Blue, one can keep repeating green, brown, blue like it is a nursery rhyme. A muted light. Suggestions of a dry summer. Maybe a recent rain. Still, it is hot, not hot like the tropical heat that makes orange, malachite green and a different kind of blue. Colors that interact in various ways. Your eye won't go around in spirals. Perspective, ratio, the length of something in relation to another. The weight of something in relation to another. What did you want, Cezanne? What did your heart desire?
There is a sketch of a group of bathers which corresponds to a bathers painting by Cezanne. Between the watercolor and oil, two bathers go missing, a sliver of sky appears in the centre like an inverted triangle dividing the composition. Assuming the sketch is what he saw, the oil is not what he wants us to see, but rather how he wants us to see it.
Then I found a book about his garden. Somebody visited his gardens recently and made a book out of it. On a balcony, there is a green trunk in which plants are grown.
But where is the revolution? I find Cezanne revolutionary because he is unconcerned about God. Not even denial. Creation was not done, but it is a constant activity that continues to happen, just like death. He does not care for where God belongs in this, but if you see the world guided by him, and must also find your faith, you cannot place your God on the other side of creation. God is born every moment, and dies every moment.
