Art Attack

Pop Quiz:

Find the odd man out:

Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Mr. Arun Narayanan, Rembrandt.

If you answered ‘Vincent van Gogh’, you are correct.

While the other members of the list possessed, or are in possession of, a pair of ears, dear old Vincent cut off part of his left ear in what can be described as artistic expression.

However, those who know me well (and even those who don’t) would attest the fact that the presence of my name in the above list is much odder than Vincent and his cut ear.

Lets put it this way: If Leonardo represents the Taj Mahal of Art, I represent the Smelly Rat-Infested, Fetid Sewer System of Art.

Ho now, you might say. My art cannot be that bad.

Here’s news for you, kiddo.

It is.

Ever since I learnt to hold a crayon, Art and I have never been the best of pals. My dad still keeps reminding me of the gazillion colouring books he bought me during my innocent childhood. The main objective of colouring the figures in these books was ‘to keep the colours within the outline of the figure’.

Apparently, after I was through, there was colour on the outside of the figure, on the rest of the page, the next page, the floor and walls of the house. But no colour inside the figure.

Undeterred, my parents enrolled me into many a Drawing class. Drawing teachers during my day where characterized by possessing huge pairs of spectacles, many sheaves of pearly white paper and dozens of kilograms of assorted fruit, displayed in various baskets all round the room.

I vaguely remember some of my Drawing lessons.

Drawing Lesson #1: ‘Still Life’.

The objective was to capture in true spirit and tone, a pile of fruit artistically arranged around an ornate fruit bowl.

Not being much of a lad for dimensions, I proceeded to draw the fruit arrangement to the best of my ability.

The end product comprised the following entities:

An apple so big that had it been real, it would have Ended World Hunger Once and For All.
A pink pineapple.
Grapes the size of watermelons.
Vice-versa.
An orange.
Wait, that’s not an orange, that’s a banana.
Etc.

Somewhere nestled within this fruit salad was an ornate fruit bowl which was not clearly visible unless you happened to have a microscope handy.

Drawing Lesson #2: ‘Bird and Tree’

Have you ever seen a green crow the size of a Jumbo Jet sitting on a tree the size of a sapling? No? Then you absolutely must come and see the end product of Drawing Lesson #2.

Drawing Lesson #3: ‘Teacher said “No more lessons from today.”’

School was the place where my Artistic Skills truly blossomed. The artist within me awoke. Of course, this particular artist had awoken after consuming 50 bottles of brandy the previous night, leading to a bit of a hangover when he awoke.

My school specialized in ‘People Drawing’. Meaning that, instead of drawing orchards of fruit or zoo-fulls of green crows, we were told to draw people.

And that’s when the trouble really began.

I must have been absent when they taught us how to draw people. Oh, I drew people all right. Only problem is, these people lived on the Planet Zook, not on Earth.

How shall I describe my people?

Well, for starters, all of them possessed absolutely circular heads. They were all as bald as a bowling ball. Their arms extended from their faces, their legs from their throats. They possessed no visible signs of an abdomen. And they were always smiling. Regardless of whether the subject was Teacher’s Day or Cemetery Scene, my people were always beaming with happiness.

A particularly favourite topic at school was Janmashtami. We were instructed to capture the essence of this wonderful festival in all its myriad colours and tones. Naturally, when the word Janmashtami is uttered, the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind is the spectacle of athletic blokes balancing on the shoulders of their colleagues in an attempt to build towering human pyramids… the famous Govindas.

Would you like to know how I used to portray this spectacle?

No?

Tough luck. You are gonna know anyway:

Firstly, I never believed in the concept of a pyramid. I preferred to stay two-dimensional, thus subjecting my Govindas to do what best they could in a triangular formation.
The triangle would be built thus: 8 Govindas in the base, 7 in the first level, 6 in the second level, 5 in the third level, and so on, and, if you follow me, so forth, until I ran out of Govindas, resulting in one Govinda at the absolute pinnacle of this magnificent human edifice.
I used to force my Govindas to stand on each other’s arms, instead of balancing on the other chap’s shoulders. No wonder several of my Govindas later complained of chronic arm-ache.
Despite the severe arm-ache, all my Govindas would smile.
More often than not, I used to forget the pot (matka) at the top, the ultimate goal for any self-respecting Govinda. This would result in a picture containing about 30 circular faces arranged symmetrically in a triangular formation, smiling away to glory, with no aim or objective in life.

Another favourite of my Art Teacher at school was Sports Day. Not having participated, or even attended, many Sports Days, I had to summon every bit of my creative skills in order to come up with a reasonable facsimile of the event in question.

Now you will understand why my school was never eager to sponsor my entry for the Elementary and Intermediate Drawing Exams.

The fact that my Standard VI Art Teacher tore up my Sports Day depiction in front of a class of 60 sniveling classmates is description enough.

One thing though: If you happened to feature in my Sports Day paintings, regardless of whether you were the winner or the loser of the race, you would always be smiling.

How, you may exclaim, did I manage to go through Art in school?

Here are a few of my secret weapons, guaranteed to get you through any School-level Art Class:

Recycle old paintings drawn by artistically-inclined seniors.
Bribe your artistically-inclined classmates to draw stuff for you.
Tell Mom to draw it for you.
Say “My dog ate up my drawing.” Add a pathetic expression for extra effect.

In Standard Nine, my school, in its infinite wisdom, decided to make Art a compulsory subject for all. Meaning that regardless of whether you ace Math or English, if you flunked Art, you gotta repeat the year.

Luckily, Standards Nine and Ten were exempt from this rule. Which is lucky for me, otherwise I would still be in Standard Eight today, instead of writing this piece of drivel for you.

The agony wasn’t over, though. Standard Ten featured a chapter titled Food Chain which basically consisted of a lot of animals eating a lot of other animals and the complex relations that exist between them.

For some reason, my Science teacher would insist that I accompany every description of the Food Chain with a figure featuring not less than five animals eating each other up.

She realized her mistake when she sat down to evaluate my Prelim paper and saw a mosquito-sized wolf trying its best to gobble up a dinosaur-sized rabbit.

Later, my worthy Science teacher suggested that I stick to using boxed notations, a technique in which boxes containing the words ‘rabbit’ and ‘wolf’ were connected by arrows, instead of representing Nature in All Its Glory.

Thank God I didn’t opt for Biology in Junior College.

My tryst with Engineering Drawing is reserved for another blog.

Alas! There is no hope for me! I am doomed to be relegated to the back-alley of the Art world. An outcast, a pariah, whose art isn’t worth the paper it is drawn on.

Or is it?

Ever heard of Abstract Art?

There can be nothing more abstract than Sports Day or Janmashtami!

Paris, here I come!