Art, As I Grew

Art has always found its way into our home. My mother made sure that everything was presented beautifully. Any outdated product or rubbish would often be sieved through her eyes and produced into a whole new artefact. I was an outdoor child and would spend whole days out in the sun playing. So, I would rarely witness her doing the craft. Having mostly seen the final product, I would think of her as a magician who popped new items out of a magic hat!

When I was a child, my mum spent a significant amount of time learning how to make stuffed animals so that we always had them as companions and not having toys would never be a problem. A significant part of my early childhood was spent assembling classrooms full of stuffed animals, who were my students, obviously, and endlessly imagining being a teacher. Through these role-play games, I spoke in gibberish with my stuffed students and gave them gold stars on their furry hands.

Having been inclined towards storytelling, my mum allowed me the scope of any and everything in dress-up competitions in primary school. She would secretly enjoy it herself, creating costumes using objects or cloth and putting her creative hat on. With a plethora of ideas in her mind, she would make me different people, animals or objects, and I would enjoy all the attention I got. The stranger the costume, the more fun we would have coming up with the idea of it. I would entirely immerse myself in the character and take upon its body language. Imagine the various people and things I could be!

Festivals brought in different forms of artwork through traditional customs. Having so much to celebrate, each festival introduced me to different textures to play with. More than making arts and crafts, I would enjoy touching different objects and materials and allowing myself to relax in the continuity of exploration. This included mixing paints and playing with colours during diya painting, cutting long strips of paper while making lanterns for Diwali and using them as hair, helping in sieving and watching the rangoli fall evenly on the ground and playing with mud and water while making killa (fort). I am sure this is a common experience and captures a significant part of childhood effectively.

Art slowly started integrating into high school, with a double class at some point during the week. In spite of enjoying living and growing with art around me, I would be put off at the thought of art class. I had no interest whatsoever in any activity or assignment that was given to us and would always procrastinate until the very end, only to make a barely decent artwork with the least enthusiasm, just about qualifying me to get through my grades in art. I would often daydream during art class and eagerly wait for it to get over.

I always wondered why I showed so little fervour towards art classes. Over time, I have come to realise that the one thing art has given me is freedom, and expression through that freedom. So, the moment I got bound by classes, assignments and predetermined topics, it would strip away all the joy from it. Art would start looking like a meticulous chore that I dreaded until the very end of school.

During college I rediscovered the love I felt for art and got myself drowned in costumes, makeup, designing and playing around with anything I could touch and mould. Intercollegiate competitions gave me loads of opportunities to remind myself of the power that comes with being able to create anything that feels meaningful to you.

I pulled all-nighters listening to music and feeling vulnerable towards how beautifully it was written. I would obsess over a story I read, a talk I listened to, a play I watched or an improvisation we did in the drama group. I would make it my responsibility to talk about every word I had kindled inside me and turn it into art. I met people further on who had an inkling towards art and wellbeing. I wholeheartedly put myself in the same field to try and indulge in the length and breadth of how people could make so much meaning out of things they created and loved. I did this through workshops and activities for children, participating in plays that helped topics of social injustice be heard loud and wide.

More recently, one of my closest friends I made in the UK who works closely in art history, curation and outreach, showed me a different side of art that I had been blinded to all this while. I use the word blinded very coldly because somewhere deep down, I felt disheartened about how little I consciously felt of something as ingrained in me as a first language.

I visited some art galleries with my friend, who would insist on just dropping everything to take a train to wherever there was a showcase. She spoke so passionately about art and showed me how the same art that I have lived and grown up with, is political in every capacity. This must be such an obvious thing for most people, but I do shamefully admit that I had not consciously thought of it in such a way before. I actively searched for words to explain to myself why this had happened.

One of the exhibits we went to in London was called (Un)Layering the Future Past of South Asia. I distinctly remember becoming teary after witnessing something so powerful and deeply rooted in the histories of people from different regions. The exhibit gave me a visual of some of the most tragic times of war and the fight for justice in different regions, tied together by a common resilience. It touched upon so many areas of impact, such as the environment, social hierarchies, economic imbalance, gender roles and the slow dissipation of native art.

I remember coming out of the exhibition not being able to produce words to justify how I felt. The tears were partly because of how moved I was by the art, but also because I felt a deep sense of shame and a need to acknowledge how little importance I had given to art. It had always been a subliminal part of my life that just went on somewhere in the background. That very activity of making and growing with art had always been taken for granted, without actually understanding its power. A part of the reason for this is that art was never introduced as an important tool of expression. It was always presented as a recreational activity.

These later experiences of being exposed to art have shifted something in me. They have made me understand myself better and consciously realise how important it is to integrate art into expression. Through this, I have found confidence in my own voice and become more cognizant of the voices of others around me. I have felt so much about so many things that I had no idea mattered to me! There is an honesty in the way art speaks that cannot be missed. It has carved my identity, which I am sure is greedy to seek out more and keep filling itself with years of being silently receptive.

About the Author :

Priya Chitanand is a Psychologist at the Secret Ingredient Mental Healthcare, Pune. She enjoys immersing herself in stories, films, music and books. She loves engaging with people and believes that expression is a fundamental drive to human existence. She loves working with children and enjoys the novelty they bring to her perspectives.