The Gaze on Women

This is a story common to all women in varying degrees of similitude, but a particular little girl enjoys the limelight in mine because she had a painting to look at. It was a painting her mother had painted, which her father also looked at. Though it was not often that she got a glance at it, anybody else hardly ever did.

This was not the only painting her mother had painted. There were many, most of which were painted during the mother’s maiden days. Her paintings had been valued as mere decorative pieces to complement the furniture in her maiden house, she felt, so she folded them up and took them to the new house when she got married. The new house already had some decorative pieces to complement the furniture, so the paintings were folded up and kept away in the store room.

Once a year, they were taken out, only to be cleaned up and put back again. One such odd day on one odd occasion, the little girl caught sight of that painting. As her mother sat dusting it with a piece of cloth, her eyes followed her mother’s hands tracing the shapes with clean, wet strokes, and she gazed at it from behind her mother’s shoulder.

She had a better look afterwards. There was a sylvan setting, nothing short of a dreamscape, with heavy flower-speckled foliage and butterflies fluttering above. Amidst it were three women with flowing robes tied loosely around their petite curves and patches of flowers tucked in their hair here and there. They were involved among themselves, busy in their passive plays by the waterside, and a light chatter flowed through the scene, it seemed. They were not painted to perfection, but they were beautiful.

Three Fairies by Beena Agrawal (Eshna’s mother)

There were several others—a portrait of bani-thani, one of a sringarika, some floral still lives, and a few landscapes—in the lot but that one had an unrivalled appeal for her.

By the time her father came home, she had selected the wall which was good enough to be graced by it, had decided to remove the wall-clock to clear the spot for it, and had fancied complementing curtains in the background to go with it. She fancied the painting in the limelight of everyone’s gaze, and thought of the appreciation it would earn its artist. Excited, she rushed to the father and announced her plans to him.

“Which painting?”

“Oh,” she dragged her father to the large canvas, unrolled the heavy sheet and pointed to it, “this one.”

Her father instantly gave a confused, unimpressed look which subsequently turned into a frown. He raised an eyebrow, shook his head, and told her to choose some other painting.

“Such a painting belongs in the bedroom,” he said. He looked at it for a good two minutes before busying himself in other work. The little girl could not understand what he meant but did not like the idea at all. Yet she knew her father’s judgement was final and binding—it was always final, whatever he said—so she started considering another painting which might be good enough as a replacement.

She chose the bani-thani and her mother said that she found the sringarika pretty. The father thought them appropriate enough to be exhibited; his gaze approved of their aspects. They were beautiful, undoubtedly, but she found it unsettling what had made the father approve of them and dismiss the first one. The two portraits depicted women thoroughly adorned with specks of alta, veiled in gold-inlaced drapes, and wound in coils of pearls. Pearls after pearls in coils after coils were painted as perfect rounds, kept apart at measured distances, never touching the next pearl yet seemingly stringed together by the sheer force of discipline. The women stood far removed from any discernible background. They stood perfectly still. They stood perpetually silent. They stood only to be looked at.

Then there were The Three Women who were always too busy frolicking among themselves to acknowledge any gaze that the father had been trying to protect them from. She could not look at them very often but she heard their chatter, distant and unintelligible, whenever her mind wandered off to them. Quieting them at intervals, she could also hear her father’s words about “such a painting”, “such a girl”, and such others.

Their chatter and those words rang together in jumbled dissonance until they turned into an incessant babble, a constant disturbance. As the babble started making sense to her, the disturbance deepened; she came to understand why that canvas was folded up and kept away in the store, why the bedroom was otherwise the only safe place to keep those women, why their bare skin was made unavailable for the gaze that relished it; she came to understand why her mother had not wished to exhibit her own paintings all these years, why her father had more say in how and where those paintings were to be exhibited, why everything her father said was final and binding; she understood that her father had looked at the painting for a good two minutes before dismissing it as inappropriate.

The babble still keeps ringing but now she can decipher distinct notes of the disturbance. The painting still sits folded away but now she sees it in shades and tones of understanding.

Written by Eshna Gupta

Edited by Shriya Kotta
Images provided by Eshna Gupta

In a World of Their Own

I saw an artist’s head somewhere it couldn’t have been and that sent my thoughts on a flight of fancy. There emerged a singular train of thought that I tried hard to follow through.

It is a matter of ordinary banter that artists often ‘live with their heads in the clouds’, as you must have heard it too. Even when spared any mocking jeers, their creative act is elevated to a distant and clouded tower of ivory. Thinkers, poets, artists, and others of this lot are easily exempted from our ordinary world to retreat to their hazy ivory towers of pristine perfection. Anywhere on the bridge between those general gibes and their lavish indulgence of artistic license, there does not seem to lay a stretch of space which belongs to an ordinary world—ours and theirs.

Whether exalted or marginalised, either way they are positioned at a distance. It might be the very position of distance that which brings them their unique perspectives, and introduces them to new places to explore with the ticket of their artistic imagination. Where does the distance end and which are these new places they come to find for themselves? Are they too out of the common lot’s reach—even farther than the clouds?

This is where my train of thought ended up after I saw the head of that artist—not in the clouds, but in a glorious gathering of the greatest minds of ancient Greece. The artist himself couldn’t have been there but he had a special access—the creative power of that head, the ticket of imagination. This was the singular train of thought I tried hard to follow, to accomplish framing a piece of writing after its trail, which started from that head I saw.

On the extreme right edge of Raphael’s The School of Athens painted in 1510, amidst the expansive crowd depicted in the painting, there is a miniature head which is unmistakably similar to another full-sized portrait of the same artist. The fresco is an emblematic depiction of an assembly of numerous well-known Greek philosophers, astrologers, poets, artists, and other representatives of classical knowledge. In the scene of that assembly, there is one peculiar head—disengaged from the entire crowd, looking away from the central subject and at the viewer instead. It is the head of the artist who painted it; where he himself couldn’t have been, his head is placed.

Among early Renaissance artists, there emerged a tradition of coyly incorporating self-portraits in grand depictions of historical, mythological, and classical scenes. They only appeared as members of the crowd, somewhere in the background, often at the edge of the frame. Such incorporations, called ‘inserted self-portraits’, can be found in Botticelli’s The Adoration of Magi, and his disciple Fillipino Lippi’s The Dispute with Simon Magus, among many others.

Raphael’s The School of Athens

Botticelli’s The Adoration of Magi

Lippi’s The Dispute with Simon Magus

These early Renaissance paintings, besides some written evidence of inserted self-portraiture in medieval biblical paintings, are the earliest surviving examples of self-portraiture in western art. Inserted self-portraiture has been repeatedly featured in western art in various forms till later as well, and the earliest origins of self-portraiture date back to antiquity. However fascinating, I will not take it up presently. After all, I am supposed to follow a single train of thought to accomplish framing the said piece of writing.

Though, it is of immense interest that the earliest self-conceptualisations—as we know of Western art—take place in fantasy. These were the stories which were current in popular imagination, were heavily reproduced and thus would have inevitably haunted the imagination of these artists too. They depict themselves as participants in these scenes, which were readily available as visuals but never accessible in experience. The motif of interest in these paintings is not the inserted self-portrait alone, but how the artist re-creates fantastical moments and participates in them by the virtue of his creative power.

Every devout Christian would have wanted to live the holy moment of the Adoration, as fervent followers of Greek philosophers would have given all they could to stand amidst that assembly. Everyone holds such fantasies but who could live them, even if virtually?

And thus, my train of thought ended up in these dreamscapes—realistic to paint but impossible to experience—that these artists create and end up dwelling in. Probably when others are busy mocking them for being removed from reality, they are busy constructing their alternative realities which the down-to-earth fellows can only look up and wonder at. The world might or might not oust them, but why wouldn’t they wander if they have the ticket—to the clouds and beyond them.

Say as one might, that they live with their head in the clouds; I saw one who was living in an experience available exclusively to him. Glorify them as one might, that they are too fantastic to inhabit reality; I saw one as an ‘inserted’ head, real in aspect but in a world of his own.

Written by Eshna Gupta

Edited by Shriya Kotta
Images provided by Eshna Gupta

Mirrors: Meet Yourself and Reflect

Count the number of times you check yourself out in the mirror every day, I dare you. Count the number of times you would have ever looked at your reflection in the looking glass, I dare you. Count the number of hours you have spent and will spend in a lifetime staring closely at your all-too-familiar image, I dare you.

We live with so many mirrors around our living spaces, we are bound to get obsessed with how we look. There was never an introduction, but our image has always been too familiar to our gaze to need an introduction. Stop and reflect… Can you even recall the first time that you looked at your reflection? I wonder how you might have felt. I also wonder about the person who had first encountered a reflection of their own. They couldn’t have been aware that it was just an image produced by a reflective surface, so what did they think it was? What would have been their reaction? I bid you to wonder.

You and I would not be the first to go on that flight of fancy. Myth, legend, and literature bring us many stories of the human’s first encounters with their images; but the first that comes to my mind is not of Narcissus drowning himself in self-love or of Eve getting enchanted by her own image. It is rather the elementary tale of a dog barking at its own reflection in the pond, apprehending it to be a rival and a threat to his loaf of bread. The character in question might not be a human, but the reaction it gives seems most likely in that event of a very first innocent encounter.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti paints one such scene in which a couple comes face to face with their mirror images in a fantastical ‘mirror’ world. How They Met Themselves portrays two identical couples, each walking hand-in-hand with their partner, strolling through the middle of woods, dressed in identical medieval attire, carrying the same objects, as they stumble upon each other. The four individuals betray a different reaction each to their incredible sights.

The inspiration behind Rossetti’s How They Met Themselves comes from the idea of mirrors, reflection and the similar-looking but (physically) inaccessible ‘other side’ of mirrors. Rossetti was one of the founders of the 1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Pre-Raphaelites obsession with mirrors is certainly intrinsic to his works.

Unlike most paintings from the school that the pre-Raphaelites influenced, the painting does not feature mirror as a physical object but uses it as a concept instead. The way they are situated exactly opposite each other, painted in likeness as they are, is obviously intended. Of the two pairs, the one on left can be clearly identified as the ‘reflection’ as it is outlined by a faint glow that marks them as inhabitants of an ‘other’ fantastical world.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘How They Met Themselves’, pen and ink and brush version, 1851-1860

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘How They Met Themselves’, 1864 watercolour version

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘How They Met Themselves’, watercolour version, c. 1860-1864

There are three different versions, though extremely similar in rendering, which Rossetti painted around 1851 and 1864. There are very minor yet notable differences in the three, but these minute details provide scope for much interpretation. In all three versions, the encounter is a dismal misadventure as the ‘real’ lady faints at the sight of her ‘other’. The ‘reflected’ woman’s expressions can be interpreted as concern in one, and suspicion or hostility in the others. The ‘reflected’ man stares in shock at his ‘other’ while the ‘real’ man looks shocked in one, confused in the other and carries a blank face in the third. In all three versions, the ‘real’ man’s sword is drawn. He is ready to fight the ‘other’, not knowing what else to do—just like the dog barking at its own reflection in the pond.

I often enjoy holding babies up in front of mirrors to watch them get fazed at first and then stare blankly in confusion. Sheer fun, I tell you! But now I wonder what they feel—looking into the mirror, looking at themselves, without any idea what either is. Our images can’t be mesmerizing to us before we familiarize them enough to become obsessed with them. Yet after spending uncountable hours of our lives in front of a mirror, after consuming our own image to the point of obsession, can we still remember how it once left us fazed and frightened?

It seems Rossetti also found the dog’s story more probable than the myths of Narcissus and Eve. Later in his life, he filled his home and studio in Chelsea with mirrors. His visitors admitted that coming across the mirrors over and over again all around the house made them eerily anxious and frightened. It seems as if Rossetti’s invitation had said, “Come, visit and meet yourself, I dare you.” What do you think his intentions were? Was it to remind them that it was their reflection that scared them once, and still could? I bid you to wonder.

Written by Eshna Gupta

Issue edited by Shriya Kotta
Featured Images provided by Eshna Gupta