My first art lesson in high school killed any passing interest I might have had in drawing. Mr. Jungbadhur (It doesn’t matter how you say it – you’ll see soon enough why I didn’t like the man) made us draw ellipses for a solid hour and a half. Apparently a glorified oval was the foundation of all artwork. It had to be perfectly symmetrical both horizontally and vertically. He walked around the room commenting loudly on everyone’s progress. You know, because shouting at adolescents and ridiculing them in front of their peers is so conducive to producing great art. By the end of the double period he had convinced me that I had absolutely no talent at all. His exact words were, “If you can’t even draw a simple ellipse you’ll never be able to draw anything.” The next three years of compulsory art classes were a waste of time. He didn’t even bother to look at anything I did after I failed the ellipse test.
Thank goodness Art wasn’t an exam subject. It didn’t matter if I sucked at it. I was brilliant at English, Math, and Science. Life went on, as it does. I finished high school, got a couple of degrees – pretty much lived my life without caring that I couldn’t draw. The funny thing is that all through university the most effective study technique I found was making mind maps. Using bright colours, thought bubbles, and arrows to link ideas made it easier to organise and remember huge amounts of information. This is why I always had a jar of pens and pencils on my desk. One day, my mom came to visit. She picked up a piece of paper that was lying on my desk. “This is pretty. What is it?” “Nothing. I was just doodling while my brain was busy with more important stuff.” “I like it. Can I have it?” It’s still on her refrigerator door more than 20 years later. Of course that wasn’t enough to make me believe I could actually draw. My mom’s opinion of one silly doodle couldn’t exactly compare with the definite judgement of an expert teacher who drilled it into me once a week for three years that I was useless at art. Years later, I played with paints with my daughter. Anyone can do the basics of mixing primary colours to produce secondary colours. At some point I realized that abstract art was a real thing that didn’t need ellipses. It wasn’t like I was trying to draw a bowl of fruit or vase of flowers. Around this time my husband was given an easel. We put up a piece of card board and all of us kept adding little doodles. He did the more realistic stuff while Athena and I did clouds and coloured in different places until it felt complete. There are so many memories of things we couldn’t keep. My first attempt to draw something intentional was when somebody gave my son a book with instructions to draw aliens. He asked me to help him with it and I couldn’t refuse. There isn’t really a perfect blueprint for drawing a kid’s version of an alien, so even I couldn't mess it up too badly. To my surprise it turned out pretty similar to the illustrations in the book. There’s a picture of it on Facebook somewhere with a note attached that says, “Take that Mr. Jungbadhur!” That was the point at which I started paying attention to what I doodled while the rhyming words floated around in my head. When our lives fell apart in Johannesburg during the Covid lockdowns, my words failed me completely. For the first time in my life I stopped writing. Even poetry couldn’t capture the emotions. I woke up one morning with a picture in my head that I couldn’t explain in words, so I started trying to draw it. Some parts, like the profile of the face and the shape of the brain, had to be copied from templates that I found online. The outline of the tree was freehand but done lightly in pencil first so that I could erase mistakes easily. Then the shading happened in layers. It took months to get it exactly the way I saw it in my mind. I was still adding details after we moved to Greece. It is the first piece of nonverbal art that that truly felt like an expression of something deeply personal. I used it as a profile picture for my South African Indian in Greece Facebook page. When I was asked to create the Healing for Rising page I put it in as a placeholder that I figured somebody else would replace at some point. Yesterday we were talking about how to set up our Zoom room for World Unity Week and somebody suggested we use the “Brain Tree” image as our background. I don’t think they quite understood the enormity of the surprise in my voice when I responded with, “I drew that!” It occurred to me this morning that it is an interesting coincidence that biggest acknowledgement of my ability to draw happened on the same day I was invited to join a WhatsApp group of people who attended the same high school as me in the 80s and 90s. It is such a wonderfully powerful reminder of the cosmic synchronicity. I am humbled and overwhelmed by the state of flow in this moment. This is the point at which I paused my writing about the evolution from being told I would never be able to draw to hearing a suggestion that one of my drawings be used as a backdrop for an international space to host presentations about healing. I thought I would finish writing after the weekly Zoom meeting with the Bridging Continents group. As we were wrapping up, one of the other participants held up a paint palette! Of all the things in the world to use as a metaphor for people of different backgrounds working together she chose to hold an actual physical tray of watercolours! What more can I possibly say?! The moral of the story is: When somebody tells you you can't do something, do it anyway... and take pictures... and write a blog about it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
KarmillaWhy can’t I be pretty and a feminist and a mother and a healer and an activist and an educator and a warrior? Archives
March 2024
Links you might like
|