At first glance a high-rise building, its white roof top leans towards your left. Bring your gaze from the white of the roof; just forget about the roof and move to the shadowy dark patch to its bottom left. Be there for a good while, relax, and then slowly approach the floor of an interior. Go back to the dark patch which is actually the exterior wall of the building. Back and forth until the eye familiarizes with this new perspective, and now climb up the dark square patch with a window just adjacent to the floor of the interior. Blink, and the roof is back. Like as though holding on to a slippery eel, perception shifts, on and off, on and off, until the roof top becomes a white wall in the interior.
This being is at ease with this kind of seeing. Double, sometimes triple ways of seeing. One line moving into the other, the other supporting yet another, an intermingling of spaces birthing into and from each other. And perhaps therefore the choice of such potential geometric structures that lend multiple perspectives. Not necessarily do they have a story to tell in the drawing or painting, but mostly satisfies an innate need in the artist. With it comes a sense of wholeness, completion, fulfilment. The lines keep moving, forming, as I keep searching for that expansive multiple vision.

Parikrama

One mustn’t forget that the line touches the artist’s fingers, touches his hands, touches his heart, and touches his head. Like ink that bleeds from a pen held by a hand, the line, the light and the dark hues are a living throbbing existence. It is the artist himself. They are pathways of fulfillment that the artist creates. Quite like entering a temple. First a removal of your slippers and a grounding as you step into the parikrama or circumambulatory pathway. Senses come alive, bare feet on warm stone, breeze on bare chest, the elements come calling. The skeletal lines in the drawing are now accompanied or attached to some shape, textures, patches of light and dark, dots and dashes-sensations, perturbations and ambiguity…

Mandala

Now, you enter the Mandala reverberating with the recital of mantras, chants. In this new space that’s just uncovering itself, there’s an urgency to be, to just allow yourself to be. Forms emerge, and along with it a simultaneous melting away and sorting out unwanted images. What you thought was your subject matter, by now takes a beating. It takes on a new garb, new worlds are appearing and disappearing too. You’re not in control of this process. It startles you with what it demands of you, to step into unknown territories. You are now playing with perturbations and little delights occurring here and there on the canvas. Painful to the eye, but joy in the heart.

A lot of dwelling time here as you wait and watch the formation of this new space. You’re in it! Now there’s no going back! You might as well be. Your hand continues with a familiar carving, a muscle memory, with a loving attention to the light and the shadows. A hue darker here, lighter there, some grouping, some erasing, some highlighting…and soon this being is looking forward, there’s a sense of excitement, freedom, just before it steps into the Antarala.

Antarala

As this new world takes over one is forced to slow down, sit and watch in awe, feel the relief permeating through oneself, the joyful proclamations. And here I allow myself the freedom of leaving the drawing in haste and looking out the window as though disinterested! Not to see anything in particular but to disconnect for a short while from the intensity of being; wrapped in the safety of knowing that you can’t get lost now. You just have to finish it off, the play. Back at the drawing table, and there’s clarity of form, focus, and a knowing that contentment is not far away. There’s no hurry, no fear of stepping into the unknown. You’re drenched in love line light shadow.

Garbhagriha

At the garbhagriha, well, who knows! Who cares!
The more you look the more are the possibilities of endless worlds. The more this being looks, the more she feels like walking away, letting go. And so I stand accused of not erasing that unnecessary intrusion of a dark form or the masking of yet another into the background, so that just the idol remains. A few more hours at the drawing table and yes it is possible. But why? I keep wondering. Especially when there’s hot soup flavored with lemon grass a few feet away. Moreover at the Garbhagriha in that moment, there is no idol I hungered for, just a faint breath, mine; and the aliveness of whatever I touch, whatever I see, whatever I hear…everything’s perfectly fallen into place.

@Anuradha nalapat 2021