The American Brush - Guest Post by American Painter Kathryn Myers

As I write this on the train to and from New York, it occurred to me that, in India, it would be unfathomable that I would spend time on a train looking at my computer screen rather than out the window.  In India, even the most seemingly mundane or incidental activity could be cause for active engagement, a chance to frame and share the experience. Facebook, which I had not regularly used before, became a daily diary that allowed me unfold my story slowly, morning by night, day by day.  Usually, I come home and people ask “how was India?” and I want to say, “Do you have six months to sit and let me tell you?” Away from my regular responsibilities, in India, the internal dialogue that is often detached from what is actually occurring around me, muted by familiarity and routine, became sharpened with a refreshed and heightened attention to the present. 

 

 Without constrictions of time, I could follow unlikely paths that beckoned, or wait out a storm in a tiny chai shop not annoyed at being lost or frustrated by a seeming waste of time.  I could see everything as an adventure, an opportunity, a chance to talk to a stranger, a chapter in time which, until nearly the moment I left for home, seemed filled without end. Without reason, destination, or errands to run, mostly relying on my feet than my car, I would go out to just look, and to look again, enjoying creating categories of imagery in an attempt to organise the uncontainable. Some of these, such as the palimpsest of layered signs, something I became aware - upon my return - does not exist in the US, where a “post no bills” sign actually is obeyed, have developed into upcoming projects for my studio art classes.
 

As I continue to deepen my knowledge about India and Indian art, inspired and motivated by the Indian art course I teach at UConn and the paintings and videos I create as a practicing artist, what  I am drawn to falls  into places both rooted in prior experience and seen anew. Recognising that my students have been particularly drawn to my sense of connection with India, I began to create a series of short videos of devotional activities that I lecture about in class, things I have seen dozens of times on prior visits.  An Aarti in the Swaminayaran temple in Ahmedabad, the haunting plaintive call to prayer at the Jama Masjid in Delhi, or a lyrical sacred song sung on Ganges. In these simple pieces, I am able to speak about history and tradition as well as how I experience it, primarily that which is so unusual in the Christian tradition which my students are most familiar with - the overlay of the sacred and every day, the ghats being shared with dhobi walls, chai vendors and pilgrims. How the Adhan or call to prayer envelops the bazaar neighbourhood of Old Delhi, how generations of people, aunties and young women with cell phones, gathered for the intense body-enveloping sound of the ringing bells of morning darshan.  They also allow me to recapture in a more abstract way, the sensations, sounds and sights that arrested my senses before my intellect that, opened doors to knowledge as well as the deeper recesses of my heart and soul. 

 

The sense of the mythic and ancient that many travellers are initially drawn to in India has always been paired, for me, with the intense force of the present.  As I engage more fully in the contradictions and coalescence of past and present, I no longer find them as uncomfortable contrasts, or interferences, as I once did. In Orissa, my long anticipated view of Chauthyogini temple, the goddesses’ sacred space of power invaded by a bevy of workmen, disrupted my long sought out and perhaps naïve desire for a “moment of transcendence.”  My feelings shifted from annoyance to amusement and, in the end, it was a far more memorable experience as a marker in my own time, rather than the mythic time of the monument.  By contrast, my visits to the tiny Chausatti Devi in Varanasi hidden away on a side alley in that teeming city where one never expects to experience anything in solitude, feels like my private temple, and has to my gratitude, grounded me in times of need. It is then that I find myself exceedingly drawn to India for reviving my lapsed Catholic ability to experience the occasional moments of serenity, wonder and transformation that, in India are often just an instant away from earthly chaos. 

 Returning to places I know well, such as Varanasi, Ahmedabad or Goa, offered the comfort of familiarity, spending time with friends that have become family, enjoying shared memories and the most recent gossip over Goan feni, Indian rum or countless cups of chai. The familiar in this sense allowed for a needed sense of “normalcy”, the chance to sustain a regular structure of work time, writing, painting and video editing that, countered the exhaustion, numbness and jadedness that extensive travel can cause. Starting from a place of familiarity pushed me to look beyond what I thought I already

knew, to a deeper level of experience and observation or to look at the familiar in a new way.  New adventures such as my road trip with Pradosh (whose family so enthusiastically embraced “auntie,”) from Varanasi to Bhubaneswar on to Andhra Pradesh, through painted villages, family porches, storms and two rainbows, kept alive the addictive sense of the unknown and unpredictable, as well as contending with contradictory feelings about that which is so rapidly changing with that which seems impervious to change. Delhi is my new New York, things always going on, with an art scene I feel like I have known since its awkward adolescence fifteen years ago and have seen grow into something quite astonishing that I feel connected to and proud of.
 

Along with unstructured time to absorb, collect and create, was the sense of purpose that has driven much of my work for the past two years, my “Regarding India” video series www.regardingindia.com.  With several rewarding opportunities to show this work, I overcame a sense of caution foreigners often have in India, of seeming naïve, patronising, or “out of it”. Rather I was moved, encouraged and energised by the response to my work. With concern in respect of adding to the bulk of still unedited work, I still added a few new interviews to the series. Perhaps it was faith in my ability to sustain this work and an increased sense of confidence for I enjoyed the process more this time. My inquiry was more focused and I felt as if the artists I met - Dinesh, Waswo, Meera,  Heidi and others - had become friends.  I enjoyed as much reconnecting with people I met for the first time during the interviews, spending time with Ravi and Dorothea, and Jyotibai and Jyotsna.
 

 I felt a significant shift as India ceased to be so much about place this time, and more about people. Surprisingly ambivalent with my decision to travel north, trips I so much enjoyed in the past, when it was time to depart, I started regretting not sitting out the May heat in the studios and kitchens of friends rather than negotiating the challenges and loneliness of solo travel. Loneliness used to be my frequent and comforting travel companion in India. I grew used to weeks of internal dialogue, but now I can choose not to be alone.  Even in the very last hours before I left for home, suddenly sick with a new flu, friends came to visit me, Shelly and then Sundeep, and the night before I had experienced a convivial gathering of friends and a studio visit with Gopika, the beauty of whose work can only truly be appreciated up close, and I felt grateful for the opportunity to have this and other friendships grow.  

 

It would have been tragic to not want to come home. When it was time to board the plane I was really ready as there is always a desire to unpack the experience, to regroup and plan for the next time.  Nobody can live vicariously or virtually in another world. I have friends, family, a house, garden, job and history that I love, and love to come back to.  But through my ability to come and go, I am inspired to try and make the best use of my dual sense of belonging by bringing what I can of India back here, and what I can bring from here, back to India, including art, friends, and the excitement of ideas.

Kathryn Myers is a Fulbright Scholar, a professor at University of Connecticut [UConn] and a painter, who has been a regular visitor to India, working on a video documentation of Indian Art and Artists. The video series can be see at www.regardingindia.com
Kathryn's paintings can be found on her website-
www.kathrynmyers.org

 

O Lord White as Jasmine [Signature line from poetry of 12th century poet Mahadeviyakka]

The previous day had been a challenging one, especially the morning half of it.  My inner disturbance was predictably reflected in what went on around me and trying to grapple with myself took better part of the day. I did however, reclaim the day. I went, as planned, to see a show at Lado Sarai and on the way did some chores too, which was heartening.  

I walked into Gallery Threshold and some bells, a rather persistent tinkling, announced my arrival. Tunty came out of her office and walked me through the ongoing exhibition by the artist V Ramesh. The first tier consisted of paintings that referenced the oneness of being, wherein there were some rather realistic, painterly renditions of fruit – jackfruit or kathal, pomegranate and bananas with a reference to the idea that their form was reflective of the human body. In ‘This is it’, a large [60 x 80”] oil on canvas, three stalks laden with bananas were hyper-realistically drawn, magnifying each  mark and detail of form and colour. On the extreme right the fruit was ripe, ready to be eaten. On the central stalk, it was peeled as if about to be eaten and on the far right, the stalk was devoid of fruit, implying that all the bananas had been devoured, picked or fallen off the branch. Part of a human skeleton, from pelvis up to the ribs, was drawn over this stalk. The imagery seemed like a metaphor for life, wherein I inferred that the life of a banana was not really that different from the journey of life as a human being. Born, ripening, sharing, giving of oneself and then upon death, only our bare bones remain, waiting to be interred or buried.  

The lower floor of the gallery, had massive, floor to ceiling canvasses that obsessively dealt with poems of the fourteenth century Kashmiri saint Lal Ded, to the ‘vacanas’ of Akka Mahadevi, a twelfth century [Shiva] Bhakti saint-poet of south India. These canvasses were more abstract in nature and focussed on a single poem by each of the poets. Somehow, Tunty expected a response from me that evoked her own passion for these works. A long discussion ensued, compelling me to focus upon the works and the one painting that stayed with me through the rest of the day was ‘Pining for an Absent Lover’ based on Akka Mahadevi’s longing for her ‘Lord, white as Jasmine’, or ‘Mallikarjuna’, as the legendary Shiva is also referred to. A large canvas, [96x72”] in dark hues of brown and black, with just a hint of white and some flower buds, was covered with these words in multiple layers:

 

“Like a silkworm weaving                 

  her house with love
  from her marrow,
                                  and dying
 in her body’s threads
 winding tight, round,
 and round
                                        I burn
desiring what the heart desires
                                                
Cut through, O Lord,
my heart’s greed,
and show me
your way out,
                                               
O Lord white as jasmine.”

 Most of the verse was barely visible; the tone of brown it was written with was overshadowed by strokes, textures and marks in black, grey and browns. The only line that was somewhat clearly visible was “O Lord white as jasmine.” [Akka Mahadevi used this as her ‘signature’ or ‘ankita’ in all her poems]. This appeared in fragments, visible intermittently, all over the large, dull and dark expanse, written in white.  On the right hand, bottom quarter of the canvas, in a burst of white, which seemed symbolic of light, the artist had painted a woman, sitting in a meditative posture, clearly in a trance, her long tresses covering her naked body. This light was surrounded by thorn-like lines and a great deal of dark colour. The rest of the canvas was cloudy, dark; with restless marks overlaying the text with glimpses of red or yellow. And then flowers were strewn across the surface as if showering the divine, but the blooms appeared only occasionally. These were painted in the same realistic style as the bananas and pomegranates I had seen earlier. This painting was odd. I did not feel reassured, or sublime. I could not respond without the intellectual process of looking, analyzing and mentally engaging with the work to find some empathy in its sense of struggle - of dealing with darkness and then lightening of this sombre mood – transcending it. The painting itself may not have conveyed much, but I came away intrigued by the idea of an artist working so obsessively on a few lines of a single verse.  When I got home, later that night, I searched my library, for ‘Speaking of Siva’[i], and read through some fifty verses by Mahadeviyakka[ii].

 The poems were evocative of her struggle with her body, being a woman and how social conditioning confined her in her quest for ecstasy. She is said to have roamed, in a gesture of defiance, with only her long tresses as cover for her naked body, seeking the love of the Lord and kindred spirits. I had bought the book five years ago in October 2007, after attending a poetry workshop organized by Caferati in New Delhi. Professor Shivaprakash, who conducted the workshop, had informed us that ‘vacana’ was possibly the earliest known form of free verse where the poet went directly to the heart of experience, to create new words for self expression. The idea had interested me then but I did not relate as much to the obsession with Siva and this has not changed. However, re-looking at the ‘vacanas’ did lead to some reflection.

The saint poets pursued their spiritual ideals by obsessively invoking ‘lord Shiva’ through their verse. Bhakti or intense love for God is an important aspect of Hinduism of the post-Vedic period, possibly beginning with the Bhagavad Gita. I was born into the Hindu tradition of idol worship and my maternal grandmother was a devout Krishna Bhakt[iii].  One would often find her talking to her two- feet tall, murti[iv] of Krishna, bathing and dressing him and singing bhajans[v] with a great deal of shraddha[vi]. I recollect one evening some thirty-five years ago, my grandfather and I had stood outside her mandir[vii] in their summer home in Shimla, listening to her sing and when she saw her husband standing there she blushed a beetroot red, hiding her face in the dupatta that was usually draped over the top and back of her head.  I could never understand this bashfulness, especially after having given birth to four of his children and neither could I relate to this devotion to a stone statue. I recollect my own mother, following the same ritual of doing aarti[viii]; singing ‘Aum jai jagdish hare’[ix] twice a day, sometimes in such a hurried way, it sounded nothing like a devout prayer.

The bhakti tradition in India encourages worship of deities in the form of murtis or sculptures, but I personally do not conform to this even as I do find myself often folding my hands in front of statues if I do visit a temple. I have a couple of them in my meditation room. They were gifts and I did not really know what else to do with them, so they lie there and I clean and use them for the traditional puja at Diwali. It’s complicated. Inherited ideas regarding faith make it complex and I find myself constantly re-defining its parameters for myself.

In that last two years a statue, being constructed by some locals in Chauma Village in the Palam Vihar region, grew to its full height of 64 feet and a larger than life Shiva, snake coiled around his neck, a Trishul[x] reaching for the skies and accessories traditionally associated with Shiva stood before my eyes. It does not face me but with its back to the East, faces West, or possibly even South west which means that I see the right side of the Shiva statue’s profile. As I draw up the blinds each morning, this is pretty much the first thing I see and often during the day, as I look into the expanse beyond it, in a moment of contemplation, my eyes rest on this bronzed cement statue. Prior to this, when I lived in Friends Colony, there had also been a small Shiva temple, constructed by Dhirendra Brahmachari, a close associate of Indira Gandhi, just two doors down. And even though I was not a devout Hindu, I took to visiting this temple each day on my way home from an evening walk. It may have something to do with the fact that my mother would regularly visit a Shiva temple and chadao jal[xi] on the linga[xii] that somehow it got passed on, like traditions do, or maybe it was the proximity of the temple and the need for a crutch that led me to doing the same for a while.

 The idea of Shiva does intrigue and looking at this visage each day has generated more than just causal curiosity. There are many stories surrounding this unusual being, typified as the God of destruction. Part of the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, his place in the pantheon has had a chequered history where his innocent but angry nature has earned him much affection as also alienation. For me it is the idea of a God imbued with such human traits that endears. He loved with a passion and carried mementoes of his lost loves around his neck as a mundmala[xiii]. He was an ascetic with a volatile temper but found compassion when he finally gave into Parvati’s[xiv] pursuit of him and married her. He was brusque and not very finessed, but even so he is a prominent Hindu deity today.

 

After reading the ‘vacanas’, I went to sleep thinking about what I had read. The next morning I was sitting quietly in the kitchen waiting for some water to boil. There was no-one in the apartment, except for me. The silence of this part of the morning, of quietude carried over from a night of restful sleep and the early morning calm, is something I cherish. This morning, I tuned into the drone of the washing machine and microwave oven whirring simultaneously and wondered about objects of worship. I thought: if we can pray to a stone statue and find God or a connection with God through this, why could not these sounds I was hearing at this point, be as evocative of the same God?
 

Why is it only in birdsong and a river gushing down the stream that we think of as connecting us with God? Why is it that machines, which have been invented by men, who are also part of the same spirit, therefore also evocative of God, not worshipped? And then I remembered Vishvakarma the 'divine' engineer of the universe who is worshipped each year, the day after Diwali, when it is customary for all factory workers and craftsmen to worship their tools in his name. But is it the same thing I wonder.

I rather like the idea of worshipping everything from men, women, trees, rivers and birds to tools of one’s trade, but somehow feel that most of this is done as part of a ritual rather than any realized veneration.  In essence we need to find ways to find our connection with God or spirit through everything we do each day. In ancient India, everything was designated an art because it was not what the activity was but how it was done. It was the level of devotion which imbued everything- from cooking, kissing or weaving that made it an art. I guess the key to this would be to find the silence within, however we do, and then keep that as we go through the day, living with awareness of how everything is really just an extension of one’s own being and it really does not matter which path we walk. What matters is that we stay connected and feel empowered by this, writing poetry, walking naked in the forests or painting words on a canvas. 

What matters is not what we do, but how we experience life through it, to arrive at the ideal where everything, every experience is accepted with utmost faith.  This ultimate human endeavour is easier said than done, where as Akka Mahadevi wrote: 

“If sparks fly

  I shall think my thirst and hunger quelled
  If the skies tear down

  I shall think them pouring for my bath.
 
If a hillside slide on me
I shall think it flower for my hair.
O lord white as jasmine,
if my head falls from my shoulders
I shall think it your offering.”[xv]

---

[i] Penguin Classics ,translated by A.K Ramanujan

[ii] Akka Mahadevi [another way of addressing this saint poet]

[iii] devotee

[iv] statue

[v] Hymns/songs of devotion to God

[vi] devotion

[vii] temple

[viii] A prayer that is sung during an offering of light to the deity - a plate with lighted candles[diyas] is circled before the statue of the deity

[ix] Hail the lord of all creation/God

[x] Trident

[xi] Pouring milk mixed with water

[xii] Shivling/ lingam – representation of the HIndu deity Shiva used for worship in temples. The lingam has been interpreted as a symbol of male creative energy or the phallus and is represented with the yoni, a symbol of thegoddess r Shakti, female emergy. The union of lingam and yoni represents the indivisible " two-in-oneness of male and female, from whinc all life originates"

[xiii] Necklace of skulls

[xiv] Shiva’s consort

[xv]  Verse 65, translated from Kannada by A. K Ramanujan. Penguin classics pg 102