Amateur artist, musings on life

Sometimes, life forces downtime on you. As if the pandemic wasn’t enough, my body decided to rebel against me. New aches and pains in the feet came in the way of many of my favorite activities – my long evening walks, experiments in the kitchen, and more. Professional activities did not take the amount of time they did in the past, so the result – time on my hands. 

Having exhausted my genre of shows on Netflix and Prime, I decided to turn to other pursuits that will take my mind off my pain, stop me from feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in self-pity. The one I picked up with great alacrity was a childhood favorite – sketch, doodle, draw, color. In my usual style, plunged headlong. Bought out the art store – amassed a huge pile of art supplies, took a lesson from my young niece on the latest craze – mandala art, and got started anew on an old passion. 

Oh! I love the experience; letting yourself go, allowing the pen to have its own way, delighting in the blooming of new designs, playing with colors, shapes, delighting in your own success, laughing at your failure…..

As I continue to draw and color with joyful abandon, I couldn’t help notice the many parallels to living a joyful life. 

Well begun is great, but you need to stay with it to finish well. Many of my creations were great to start with; the first two ‘levels’ of my mandala had well thought out and well-executed designs. Good strong and clean lines, neat colors. Then, somewhere, my natural impatience would take over – it would turn into a ‘now finish this’ project. The result – half beautiful, half so-so, even quite shoddy. Unfortunately, it meant that the end product didn’t achieve its potential. Just as in life – many great starts, hurried finishes, outcomes that don’t reach the great levels they can!

Every pen-stroke matters, THIS stroke is all you should focus on now! This activity of making mandalas, which is repetitive patterns, forces me to focus on the ‘right here, right now, this stroke you are making’. It matters because the end product is going to be the sum total of either all well-executed lines and shapes or some poor some average and some great. If I can stay mindful of each stroke of the brush, each line of the pen, focus on doing it right, the end picture is a joyful celebration. If not, it is mediocre. Seeing how the individual strokes make up the picture is like seeing how every action in my life makes up the final picture that is my life. If I stayed focused on every action as I performed it, and make sure it was done to the best of my ability, mindfully, imagine the masterpiece I end up with!!

It is ok to not have a plan. I am not a very spontaneous person. So, letting my mind roam free and allowing the shapes and design to just emerge on paper is a new experience for me. The result delights me on some days, disappoints me on some others. But the experience of being spontaneous, without a plan, and allowing it to ‘just emerge’ is quite liberating. I am slowly expanding this attitude to life. Helps when there is uncertainty. Instead of feeling anxious about the uncertainty, I can stay focused on what is here and now, and be comfortable letting the next one emerge. 

There is always another day, another mandala. If I didn’t do a good job today, I need not beat myself up. I am a master at beating myself up, at self-critique. I have quite high standards for myself and my ego takes a huge blow when I don’t meet them. So, when I got some average designs out, or when some days the end output was shabby or not so pretty, I would feel low. That kills the spirit of experimentation, takes the joy out of the activity, and takes away the ability to learn and improve. My wee teacher reminded me of this ‘another day, another mandala’ when I was lamenting a poor drawing one day. I have taken her words to heart and the impact of this change in perspective is dramatic. The activity remains fun, mistakes are challenges – to get it right the next time, I can experiment with tougher designs without fear, and when I get it wrong, I can laugh about it. I no longer see lapses as 'failures'

The blanks are important. When you try to make a pattern, the tendency is to fill the page. But when you pause and examine what you have made, you realize that the blank space is what gives the pattern its beauty. If you fill it up completely with ‘stuff’, colors, and designs, the final picture isn’t as beautiful as the one that has some empty space in it. So true isn’t it – life needn’t always be filled with activity and people and stuff. Some empty space makes it better, we are better able to appreciate and cherish, sit back and enjoy, take a pause. 

It need not be perfect to be beautiful I know, sounds contradictory to what I wrote earlier. But it is true! When I see imperfect lines, some colouring gone wrong, a few mistakes in scale and size, they look bad, I feel like they mar the overall picture. But in reality, every picture always ends up with a few mistakes, I am only an amateur so more than a few mistakes. But to my utter delight, I discovered that it didn't matter - when the entire picture comes together, it still looks beautiful. Just like life!

You can be you. When I started, I tried to follow the traditional rules, make mandalas by copying what I saw on Pinterest and my teacher’s home page. Quickly got bored. My style, my preferences, were not the same. So one day, I decided I can just draw what I wanted to. It gave me a bonus. I branched off from mandala’s to sketches of lotus and Ganesha and other stuff which was equally fun, more appealing to me, felt like ‘art’, gave me a sense of achievement. We all have these people we hold up as the ‘perfect’ something- mom, professional, athlete, whatever. And we often want to be them, do what they do. But if we accept that we are different and it is alright to be who we are, maybe we will discover new heights, become people who others want to emulate!

When you do what you enjoy, the experience is magical. Aches and pains are forgotten, depression is kept away, hours fly by, it is just you, the pen, the paper, and that new design that is being birthed. I guess this is what is called the 'flow'. I now appreciate the fact that I may not get into the 'flow' state every day, may not get into it for the same passion every day. Today, the flow happens when I write, tomorrow when I am experimenting in the kitchen, yesterday it was that training session I was preparing for, and last night it was the picture I was doing. But I can see that these are all activities that put me in the 'flow' the things that I am passionate about.

Anyway, as you can see, my new hobby has definitely given work to my hands and time for my mind to wander. I wonder if any of you took on a new hobby this pandemic and if you, like me, discovered something about yourself, life…. Do share.