Growing up under the shade of my super talented artistic brother, I had an elusive relationship with art. I was immensely proud of the cascade of applause, awards and accolades my brother received, including one from Shankar’s Weekly International straight from the hands of the Indian President himself. Not wanting to be left behind, I gave art a fair shot - but we were not meant to be! My subject would be very clear in my head, but by the time it traveled down to my hand and fingers and onto the paper, I ended up having to call it modern art and leave it to the viewer’s imagination and interpretation to figure out what I drew. I think I did end up developing a very important skill, that of an art critic. There was enough art around the house to appreciate. And it was fairly easy to look at a piece, reflect and express with honesty my true feelings for the piece.
A few years ago, some artist friends formed an Art Club. Given my history with art, I avoided the messages to join. Well, what good would a person with my limitations be to an Art Club. After having stepped past multiple messages, one message caught my attention. It was calling for culinary creations as entries to an Art Club meeting. People who have faced the burnt..er..brunt of my cooking will understand that it certainly wasn’t my passion for cooking that caught my attention! The food entries reminded me of my special skill as a critic, and I was eager to sign up. Someone had to taste all the delightful entries! Fortunately for me, the large hearted organizers of the meeting were already calling on folks to participate as an audience, if they had nothing significant to share. I grabbed the opportunity to participate in my debut Art Club meeting in the Fall of 2016.
I am thankful to my foodie self for taking that opportunity which, far from just satisfying my palate, ended up being the most soulful sensory experience created by the palettes of the amazingly talented group of people. Well not just palettes - there were displays of hand-crafted clothes and jewelry. When I bemoaned my artlessness, my kind friends reminded me that art is a medium of expression, be it paintings, crafts, foods or even prose, poetry or other form of written words. The group accepted and welcomed my participation as the audience, which put just enough pressure on me to reflect if there was some art hiding inside of me which I could pull out for this dear, loving group. I had taken a bunch of photos of the artwork at the meeting. I spent the next day putting together
my first newsletter for the Art Club meeting. I included the pictures and wrote about the artwork, adding fun, interesting, juicy tidbits and subtle references to inside jokes. The newsletter was very well received and it was a beginning of my journey in a different kind of creative writing. I wrote and put together two more newsletters, one in each subsequent year.
My writing had a limited audience. These were my kind friends, so I did not take their appreciation seriously, though I continued enjoying my newly found relationship with words. However some members continued to encourage me to write more, to use my words as a medium of artistic expression. It was due to their relentless support that almost one year ago I started my blog. The topic of this year’s meeting was to present something that one did during the lockdown. There was also an adjunct topic of “Eat, Pray, Love”. When I presented my blog posts to this group representing my work that I developed through the lockdown, I felt I had come full circle. It also represented the essence of “Eat, Pray, Love”, the story of self-reflection, which has been a huge part of my blog. Out of all my posts, I picked the one post which captures these three elements - the one I wrote in
memory of my mother-in-law. I feel in her simplicity, she exemplified these elements, which were an essence of her life.
I am very grateful to the unwavering support of my friends and my family that I was able to channel my artlessness into these little pieces. That I am finally able to connect the subjects in my head down to my hand and fingers, and let them flow to the page. And even though my words are still open to the reader’s imagination and interpretation, I have not had to hide behind a facade of a “modern art” anymore.
(The pictures and art embedded in the post are the creations of the talented artists of the club)
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