The season commences...

End of last week an e-mail from a gallery announced that the season was commencing and that I may book the gallery to show my work. It promised a good season in a jumble of words, more like a hint than as a direct forecast. It did not use words  like 'likely to' or 'shows signs of' etc.- which the weather forecast is often likely to use - in reference to the international crowd that may flock to India.

All these years I have had just one touring artist couple, Americans, quietly staring at a small work of mine on paper. That was some years back. They asked to see the artist and when I was presented to them, they said the work was "very special". They wanted to buy it, but I, agreeing that the work was special, did not sell it to them. I sent it instead to Chitrakala Parishad for their annual show. The said work is somewhere there in Bangalore, undoubtedly lying uncared for in some pile of other rejects. I did not go to collect it. It was not important anymore.

That, I remember, was a work done during a sort of 'seasoning' of my own artistic sensibility. It was like a rush, drawing me to paint and then sit there tinkering with forms and colours unknown to me, building out of shadows, layer upon layer, figures and marks telling deep and mysterious stories to me. It was cumbersome, technically stiff and unyielding, but when it worked the result was a pleasant, always pleasant, surprise. I got tired of doing that sort of thing because I felt that it was too much reliance on chance and technique. That "season" bore no cash to my crop!
And then I stopped painting, waiting for something magical to happen that would make a studio available and money for material and bread and an occasional peg of Bacardi or something.

I surmise that "Seasons" often superimpose themselves in my life. At least there seemed to be one season with several branches. Imagine a winter in the main, branching out into summers and rains, even autumns, several and simultanious. Perhaps it was youth. Perhaps it is hormones. It may even simply be one of the many false notions I have about things. Why, I hold that life itself is a season: there is flowering, and there is withering; season is more about that than anything else after all. A day is a season, an hour could be a season! Really, what is not a "season"? It all depends on how the word is employed. A farmer may use it to describe good yeild, good money, good year. 
Ask a Sakura and she may just blush all over with the most charming bloom!