I am always very slow with my paintings, as my mother and people who have worked with me have always complained. My mother also complains that I boil the chai for too long and can’t cook in time. I take forever to conceive an idea for a new painting, brew it inside my head and then finally start working on it. I take even longer to finish it. I simply do not know when to stop; I cannot decide when a painting, or anything else I create, is actually completed.
I recently completed a painting and the process of its completion continued long after I put in my final strokes, going beyond the canvas surface. I still do not know if it is complete. Nevertheless, the process came to project the idea that had inspired it. It was not pre-designed but I should have guessed: the art I make is one of the forms of my creative expression and since the painting was about the culture of my personal creative expression, the painting was not only a representation of it but also one of its components.
The painting depicts me engrossed in my journals in which I generally write and sketch against a backdrop of a grid of tiles. The one journal in my hands can be recognised by someone who knows me very closely and some others scattered around me on the floor constitute the foreground; the 3×3 square grid that makes up the backdrop can be recognised by anybody. The room-like structure where I’m seated is painted in a rough likeness of my Instagram profile. The tiles on the wall have some posts from my own profile and some others that are typical of Instagram, such as Terribly Tiny Tales and chat stories.
The painting is a culmination of written and visual compositions I draft for my own pleasure, which I term ‘personal literature’. The composition consists of images and words, as these are deeply inter-twined elements of my sense of expression. The written note that accompanies the painting was not complementary or obligatory; it aptly represents the interdependence of my word and my visuals, making it more complete. Yet, if it was complete then, writing this column issue about the very same painting somehow makes it even more complete. When would it be finally complete—if it would ever be—and how do I decide?
The journals I have painted are very personal but I might allow selective sneak-peaks to some people. On the contrary, my social media space is easily accessible to everybody but I might also put up posts and captions that are entirely decipherable only to me. This painting, its elements, and my choice of what to include is not entirely decipherable to everyone and I don’t know where to place it on the spectrum between my private journals and my social media profile. I do know though, that the journals, the painting, and the profile belong to the same spectrum.
While the painting was still in process, I would carry it back from college at the end of each day and the curios frowns on unfamiliar faces were often followed by nods as if the painting told them something they hadn’t known before; during the exhibition, some strolled past it, some stopped to show appreciation some left written comments below it; when it was later posted on Instagram, the process of display didn’t start anew but was resumed and repeated. In many aspects, the painting is as much like my journal, or one sketch of it, or my entire social media profile, or one post of it; I composed it to be a representation of my personal culture of creative expression but it is also ended up being a component of it; I titled it ‘An Anthology of My Personal Literatures’ but it also ended up being a Chinese-box of it.
Written by Eshna Gupta
Edited by Shriya and Sukriti
Artwork by Eshna Gupta
Jabberwock Online 