Me and My Baby

Up till now, I've never really made artworks that weren't limited to exhibition in school, or kept at home under the layers of dust beneath my bed, or abandoned and eventually used as practice paper for math questions. Well, that changed yesterday. It was not at all momentous, for there was no silver factory gleaming behind me, or wads of cash flung about my person, but I suppose there's something highly personal about giving away an artwork that's worth thinking about anyway.

It begins with conception, a fuzzy idea you're not really sure will work and big dreams of colour you hope to cling on to. So I made a solo trip down to Artfriend, feeling a bit like an idiot because I never imagined how many possible sizes canvas came in and how impossible all the sizes I wanted were. And then of course, I realised how lucky I was to have the school pay for all the canvas I ever needed over the last 6 years. Some things don't last, unfortunately.

There was something immensely nice about shopping for art materials alone - no art teacher or top-of-class student telling you which brands were best, or which colours were most important, or if triple-prime was indeed better than double-prime. Which meant that I picked the nicest smelling paint and the cheapest possible everything else. I wished I could live down the aisles of paints and brushes of all sorts of shapes and sizes that I'll probably never learn to use.

Then comes the days of staring at the pristine white surface, gleaming brushes and undented tubes of paint, wondering how exactly to grab that dream and pin it down, wondering if you'd be able to do the seductively professional tools justice. The beginning of a work is never certain. But you'll decide to take a wild stab anyway. In the following weeks, it grows.

(Oil) Painting is a solitary affair. For one, your family shuns you, because of the poisonous fumes that only you are immune to. You also need to build up a fortress of paint, wipes, containers, used brushes, turpentine and cloth, which results in an impenetrable moat that nobody would cross even if you paid them to. Then, no matter how much advice you may be given from painters and friends alike, your hand can't listen. Sometimes, it feels like its the only one who knows what potential a brown blotch can hold anyway - visions belong to you alone. You stay for hours at a time, mostly because you're too dirty with paint to do anything else. If you stay long enough, you forget the world. Or the world forgets you.

About halfway through, photographs don't work anymore and you have to turn to your memory. You realise you've forgotten how the cowlick you've seen almost everyday for the last two months looks like. You don't recall how curved the eyebrows are. You have recurring impressions of one particular smile, but you can't get close enough to understand how the lips should stretch and how the eyes should gleam. But soon enough, you realise that vague impressions are all that you need - you want to replicate a feeling, a connection, not anatomy.

There are always bits that never look quite right - the cheeks always seem a bit too round, a bit too thin, a bit too shadowy, a bit too bright. You place what you think should be your final touches in the dead of the night, stop to take a stretch and get yourself a drink. But when you get back, the face on the canvas just isn't him. You sigh and go back to work.

For most of us, it takes a trusted friend to pry us away from a painting so that we dont ruin it with overworking. You tell yourself as your hands are restrained that many a great artist have concurred that Art is never finished, only abandoned. You put it aside and call it a day. Or a month. And then you don't look at it again.

The day comes for you to pack it up and send it away. You must say you're surprised - did you really produce that? You couldn't possibly have willed that touch of buff titanium, or that crescent-shaped eye. That's when you know you're truly finished with a work, some people say. But then you also notice some flaws - some crookedness in a feature- and that it isn't really what you were hoping for, but you tell yourself that that was your best effort and try very hard to stop looking at it. You spend the rest of your time worrying if the new parent will like it.

You pack it up and piss everyone off because you can't get over the fact that a corner of the painting is slightly dented, but you know it's really because you don't know what's going to happen to your baby. You wonder if its new parent will receive it well, will love it as you do with the right mix of contempt and care. It is not the same as putting a work up for exhibition - you know that intellectual boundaries may never be put on art (every viewer must think whatever he wants), but this time you feel the physical vulnerability of your baby too. Will it last? Will it be shoved into some dusty corner, some unseen darkness? But as you close the door on it, you know that there is no problem - it isn't yours anymore, and you're okay with that.