DUSTY PAINT BRUSHES
Three years, it has been around three years since I last painted, since I had hold those magical wands in my hand and played with the colours on my blank canvas. Life has been so busy all this time that instead of playing with different colors , I had been playing with the changing patterns of life, the varying shades of people and the thousand colours that fall upon us, through which we produce a better version of ourselves. And it’s not even a surprise that I again turned philosophical, eh?
Anyway so I found my dusty paint brushes lying in a jar and believe me, just a glimpse at those reminds me of the thousand minutes I had spend glued to my chair,sitting in a single position, the many sleepless nights I had devoted just to see the finished painted look on my canvas. Yes, I was so determined and ambitious about painting at a time that most of the people used to suggest me I should pursue it as a profession rather than a hobby. Just looking at those brushes, the idea to start painting again sounded extremely fascinating and I vaguely remembered I had a new canvas somewhere inside, kept safely in hopes to use again. Now there was no stopping, I quickly took my art supplies, luckily found thinner(turpentine) in the house, already had an art inspiration in my mind which I had been thinking for days. It has been a habit of mine, whenever I would see a good scenery or even a sunset, anything worth painting, I would paint its picture in my mind and preserve it somewhere in my memory. Sometimes those things give me ideas for a prose or poetry and other times, they serve as an inspiration for a new painting.
So I started prepping the canvas, putting colours here and there but soon noticed that I was just spending hours in mixing and blending the colours to achieve that perfect look. And that had been achieved but still, there was just so much missing, I was in a dilemma when u know something is missing but you don’t exactly know what. While painting, my mind didn’t concentrate on the end results nor I was centralizing the painting itself. In fact I was judging my ability, my thinking was clouded with the fear that what if, after so many months and days, my skills were dusted just like those paint brushes and what if I couldn’t paint anymore?
I was doubting myself and unconsciously contemplating all the what if’s that actually became reason why the painting looked so dull and lifeless. A painting always reflects the artists emotions, his feelings and in that moment, my feelings portrayed a very lifeless painting infront of me.
However when the realization hit me like a brick, I now had a clearer view in my mind. It didn’t take me long to realize that painting was something which I can do without doubting, even when it didn’t look so good, the end results will always be remarkable because this is something that I can do even with my eyes closed. So the work resumed, I spend days working on it and nights thinking about it, in the evenings, with chai, I would think about the additions and modifications and seeing the end result now, I know for once, this looks exactly how I’d imagined it to be.
medium: oil on canvas
