Blog

As I stood very close to the name plaque of the school, where I came to drop my kid for his exam, I noticed the central letter of the name to be slightly crooked – which from a distance looked all shining & perfect!

I realized, it’s a knowledge gained from a very close observation. A “ringside view”.

Such ringside views can often shape our reality & may help us express ourselves in the best way possible – be it literature, music or art.

Raised in the proverbial American West, Utah artist Don Weller is a living proof of this. While reading an article on him in Watercolor Artist (Fall issue, 2023), I learned that he grew up in Wash, a ranch in the eastern part of the state, surrounded by wheat fields, rolling hills, and the Palouse River. It was in that pastoral heaven, that his affinity for cowboys and horses were born.  Privileged to have a ringside view that he had, Don Weller spent his childhood drawing both humans & horses … an immersive experience that enabled him to develop a unique style of painting in later life to tell authentic stories of cowboys, horses & the Wild West.

Similarly, my background in Architecture and a city life always prompted me to go for urban subjects – a fabric woven with strands of built spaces, open vistas, urban greeneries, signages and those rare, intimate corners where people congregated & shared their stories. I found endless inspirations in the misty shadows cast across streets, colorful tourists crossing the zebra, the corner cafes with their inviting outdoor sitting or the lonely park benches.

Stories in the concrete jungle that I have lived & breathed through my entire life – my own ringside view.

Early morning in Winter in my neighborhood (From my collection of paintable subjects)

The Indian “Pushkin” of the yesteryears - Shailendra, could weave magic with his words. A master of creating the universal from the local & personal, his life was the wellspring of his poetry. Born in a remote village in pre-independence Pakistan (1923), Shailendra had an impoverished childhood & spent much of his time in slums – a meal a day & a smoke a night was all he could afford. This ringside view of poverty found its voice in the authentic and timeless lyrics he composed for many a Bollywood hit in his later life. For years, his “Awaara Hoon” & “Mera Joota Hai Japani” were the passports of warmth for many Indians visiting the erstwhile USSR, Turkey, Egypt, China, and even parts of Africa.

But sometimes, the opposite view is also true. There are artists, like the great watercolorist John Yardley himself, who would “paint a blob, if there’s a blob”, without much caring to know what exactly makes that “blob”. Let me clarify with one more example.

While it certainly does not hurt to know the subject, many artists can paint subjects that interest them without knowing very much about them, if anything at all … except for the fact that they are interesting visually. On the other hand, one could know everything about a subject, or even be an expert on the subject, and still not be able to depict it as well as one seeing it for the first time.

“Old Port Gulls”, “Working Lady” & several other oil paintings by the American artist Hodges Soileau, OPA, demonstrate his love to paint boats and water, but he himself admitted in an interview, that he knows very little about boats except which end is the bow and which is the stern. From observation, he is further aware that the shape of a lobster boat is different from that of a Shrimp boat, or an Oyster boat, etc.

And this much knowledge is good enough for him to create credible and attractive representations of life on water.

In this case, Soileau may have deliberately stayed away from a “ringside view” as he felt that may ruin his chances at creating a “truthful representation of the visual” or may be to have a go at abstraction, where too much knowledge about the subject can often be stifling.

Often enough, a ringside view can help in solving other challenges in your work – something which was not intended for immediate application, but the knowledge helped later.

Consider the Renaissance maestro Leonardo Da Vinci and his immortal creation, the Mona Lisa. In an interview with the National Geographic, American journalist & historian Walter Isaacson explained why Mona Lisa’s smile is the culmination of a lifetime of inquiry.

Sketches from Da Vinci's notebook (Armand Hammer Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

Da Vinci was obsessed with observing and understanding phenomena in nature, from the proportions of the human body to how the muscles of the lips moved. He dissected the human eye on cadavers and was able to understand that the centre of the retina sees detail, but the edges see shadows and shapes better. This knowledge combined with his understanding of expressions of human emotions – sketched in his numerous notebooks while enjoying a ringside view of the streets of Florence & Milan, finds application in his masterpiece, Mona Lisa. If you look directly at the Mona Lisa smile, the corners of the lips seem to turn downward slightly, but shadows and light make it look like it’s turning upwards. “As you move your eyes across her face the smile flickers on and off.”

Magic, but not quite. It’s actually using the firsthand knowledge of a lifetime of ringside view.

And this happens more than we even care to consider - knowledge of one thing helping another. I still remember that winter, when days on end I’d get up early & then drive down to the nearest neighborhood in search of subjects - people sleepily getting out of their homes, 1^st rays of the sun breaking the mist or the street vendors arranging their wares for a long day ahead.

To get a ringside view of “the city in winter mornings” … but later, this knowledge became handy to paint a series on “street life” instead.

So then, the question naturally arises – one of the principal reasons, why I wanted to deliberate on this topic & write the blog so that some of my own mental cobwebs get cleared – would it help or not to have a ringside view for our creative work?

The answer to that I probably found during my chat with the Pondicherry-based artist Ejoumale last month.

With Artist Ejoumale (left) at his studio in Pondicherry

During our discussion on how to select subjects and whether it is necessary to paint plein air where the “ringside view” is a given, Ejoumale explained with his trademark simplicity, that ringside knowledge is helpful, but we must not be driven by it unless that IS something we want to paint. As artists, he felt, we should find inspiration in anything we see around us – all are ringside views. He further explained that everything in this world is created with a purpose & there’s a positive energy in that creation. As artists we should seek and find out that energy and then paint that positive feeling.

And in an instant, it all seemed to fall into place. How our childhood, education, knowledge of surrounding, the immediate visual inputs or careful observations & scrutiny can all come in handy – can all together form a “ringside view” of our experiences, of our reality and facilitate the most truthful and authentic expression we can have – be it literature, music or art.

And thus, we create what we are. Within the ring.