…it was a fine, cool, rainy and mesmerizing evening. The clouds had stopped their love making but still stuck together leaving no space for the light to pass through. The Sun behind those clouds should have lost patience and gone home to rest by then. She stood still before her canvas with palette of all colors. She was drawing the outline of the picture she wants to draw and the clouds and breeze were giving colors to that painting in her mind. She knows that art is not a brain work but mind’s voice, souls rejoice, or souls cry. She knows that art is the words that she couldn’t speak or may she do not want to speak.
Those that speaks a lot inside their mind but
not outside becomes writers and those that don’t talk even within them but has
a lot to say becomes artist using colors.
She had a lot to say but, at the same time, she knows least of the least
people understands and others underestimates her.
She started with black, in fact slightly
grey. It was portrait of a man in his
early forties with broader shoulders and heavy chest with dark black
nipples. His torso is not athletic but
strong. Unusually, she was drawing the man with a small belly slightly
protruding from his body which is unlike of artist holding brushes in
general. Most of them want to draw a
strongly build man with flat stomach and curved torso and sculpted biceps and
calf muscles. No, that is not the
picture that got manifested in her mind. It was a middle-aged man who
was once strong and athletic but life had made him tired and naked; yes, it was
naked middle-aged man that was in her mind.
She tried hard to bring it in to
colors in the canvas. The harder she tried the slippery the image of the man.
So, as her usual ritual, she started painting as slower as possible and then
she lost herself in the man. The man became real in her mind and slowly he
walked towards and she asked him to stand still in a posture she wants to
paint. The image shaped well slowly. His
hands, his belly, his hips, his genitals, his groins, his thighs, his calf
muscles, his foot and fingers. He completed himself when she was him. She
merged herself in him, the Sakthi to Shiva, the momentum to the electrons in an
atom, the energy that comes in the fusion and fission.
She felt completed but not
satisfied for the story could have been told better, as all the artist’s
unsatisfaction. The stood tall, slightly
bent with tired eyes and melancholic reaction in face but healthy hands and
legs and genitals.
What do you mean by the story
could have been told better or what do you mean by story here for this is just
a vulgar picture of a man? - somebody
passing by asked her. When an outrage or a harangue was expected, she laughed
louder for few minutes irritating the questioner.
She said, “The moment you said it
is vulgar you already had a story with this naked man as protagonist in it but
that is your story and that is the first success of this man. And again, that is not what it is, not my
story. Look closer, he is not a common
man who wants to dress up and show up in suite or tuxedo and wear shoes and
ties. He is uncommon who wants to be
naked. This nakedness is not vulgar but nirvana or the body that disowns
everything, the body that doesn’t carries the life of his past or future but
the nature of his being alone. Look deep
into his eyes, little pain and sadness of the experience which he gained all
these years that which is loaded into his head making his head slouch. Look at the small scratch over his shoulders,
those are love bytes, the identification marks of the intense love making in
spite of all his pain. Look at his
uncombed hair, the carefree sense of self beautification for he knows that
beauty we see in others is something that is inside us, as Rumi said, so the ugliness.
Look at his hands ready to work,
ready to carry weights but tired of the baggage he carried all through his life
but won’t hesitate to carry again. Look
at his protruding belly, he realized he is not this body, not this mind and
brain. He started to relax too much and
enjoy the tastes for he knows he can be back into his shape anytime he wants as
this is all an illusion that mind plays in the virtual screen. He understood the illusion, the greater maya.
Look at his calf muscles, his legs and toes, ready to run and stomp on any
thorns and bushes but he hesitates for he realized the run is not going to
taking him to no place.”
“Look at his genitals…” she
started and went silent for a long time.
-why are you staring at that!!!
They asked irritatingly.
She laughed again, “you think
that person I drew, those hands and legs and organs as somebody else, but those
are part of me, from my mind and soul.
He is me in man form, my child who grew up only in hours.”
-insanity, they said and walked
away from her.
“Look at his genitals, he cares
least about this world, least worried about the culture and dogmas of this
world. He found the nirvana; everything
is his and he is everything around him. To
hide his sexuality, to cover his body, to obey the dogmas of this world is a
sin, he learnt.” She said, from the
heart of an artist. There exists nobody
to heed.
