A Not So Magical Beginning

Give a child a paintbrush and she will find a canvas!

I picked up my first crayon in elementary school and my first paintbrush in middle school. I don’t remember making any elaborate paintings. I do recall enjoying the process. I made my first handmade birthday card depicting a teddy bear with lots of wrapped boxes tied with strings. I vividly remember the vibrant colors I had used. I also participated in painting contests organized through school. Sitting on an open grassy field with a piece of paper and some watercolors with several other students, I felt deeply connected with myself and the world around me. I was fortunate that my drawings and paintings did not draw much attention. There was neither criticism, or discouragement nor much praise or expectation. The art and the young artist remained unsullied by well-meaning opinions and my art remained my own with minimal instruction or direction. I drew and painted how I was seeing the world and how I was feeling. I used my drawing skills in high school for Biology projects and in medical school for human anatomy depictions. I did not touch any art medium for a long time after that. Life got busier and more focussed on outside achievements and relationships. I received my medicalschool degree and lost my father in the same year. I was only 25. Although he had been struggling with advanced stage gall bladder cancer for few years, I wasn’t really prepared for the inevitable outcome. Who really is? Life changed for me and my family after that.

I picked up art again after moving to USA two years later. It was the month of April and Chicago was beautiful, covered with the late spring snow. Freshly cleaned side walks and roads lined by grayish white mounds and branches of trees weighed down with pristine white fluffs. There were hardly any people outside and being used to the hustle and bustle in the streets of India, the silence here was deafening. I had never felt more isolated. My husband had recently changed his job and moved from the West to east coast. Hehad rented a single bedroom apartment at a posh suburb in Chicago prior to my arrival with an intention to get my input for the interior arrangement. The apartment was spacious and minimally furnished when I arrived. It was stark and beautiful like a blank canvas. I felt utterly lost! Besides my husband, I did not know another soul in this strange new land. And although, I grew up speaking English fluently and watching English or American movies and shows, I was unprepared for the reality and disconnected from home. International calls were expensive so talking to my mom or brother would have to wait till the weekend and the call lasted for a short time.Now, I am grateful for the Zoom and the FaceTime, allowing us to connect anywhere anytime.

It took several months to get my bearings and I tasted my first freedom when I obtained my driving license. I was so excited that I drove from one end of a major road to another, covering miles. We owned one car, so I would drop my husband off to his workplace and then drive aimlessly for hours, eat lunch outside and then pick him up at the end of the day. During one such excursions, I found a small place about 20 minutes from our apartment, that had posted a flyer on their door for a coal sketching art class. I joined it immediately, with an intention to connect with other human beings over something common. In my opinion, art and music are universal languages and can convey much more than mere words can. The art class was on coal sketching. Using fingers and hard or soft coal sticks, I could make shapes and smudge the background. I would fill it in multiple shades of gray that would give definition and character to the figures I had drawn. I created two art pieces, one of my own hand and other of a woman’s head and bust. I was very pleased with my creation and put it up on one of the walls at home. I did not make any friends during that time but finally started feeling at ease with myself.

Looking back, I am grateful for that phase of my life, although I did not feel it at the time. I was learning to face my loneliness and growing accustomed to being in silence with myself. For the first time in my life, I was connecting with myself in the absence of outside chatter. This would become a meditative practice for me much later in life. And although the me that I knew and the I that I was experiencing did not necessarily like each other most of the times, it was growing into a real relationship. I was slowly transforming from a social, extroverted, bubbly young girl from India to a more serious, introverted, introspective mature woman. Silence was a blessing or a curse during the times my husband wasn’t home. I had lost interest in several of my previous hobbies like reading, dance, listening to music. I had lost touch with my friends back home. I was forced to face the grief of my father’s death with nothing else to busy myself with. Within that first year in Chicago, my husband also lost his father to a sudden cardiac arrest, and within a few months after that my brother in law lost his 1 year old son to leukemia. Grief was like an open wound that never seemed to heal. Art soothed my heart but I didn’t have much faith to keep up with it for long. Evenings and weekends were blessed relief when my husband was home. We would take short and long drives to see the night lights of downtown Chicago, to the local mall or close by lakes and my favorite place, Navy Pier, or get introduced to the local Indian people through the temple or his colleagues.

I am grateful for those few lessons in coal sketching. I had started realizing then and I believe now that life is not one shade of black or white. It is a multicolored canvas filled with million(not 50) shades of gray. And the gray gives life and character to the colorful parts, lifts them up, makes them obvious. The colors become beautiful, get their personality, because of the gray. I love my grays, they are a perfect contrast to my fun yellows and the fierce reds and the cool blues.