Painting in layers
Letter 153 , Painting in layers
Dear friend,
When I was twenty-one I bought a little blue book. I sat down one evening and wrote three things in it about the life I wanted. I wanted to inspire and support a million entrepreneurs. I wanted to work, every day, with a small team of inspired and capable people. I wrote a third thing, and I am going to keep that one to myself for now.
Then I closed the book. I went to college. I got a job. I got married. We had kids. I forgot the book existed.
Twenty years later, I am sitting at a table in front of a small canvas, painting a tree-lined road I see every morning. The first layer looks wrong. The orange is too loud. The trees look like skeletons. The proportions are off. I step back, half ready to be embarrassed, and a small voice inside me says, this can't possibly become something.
I keep going anyway. Six layers later, my hand is holding a painting.
And I notice something I should probably have noticed earlier. The painting did not wait for me to be ready. It taught me, one stroke at a time, how to make it.
Then a second thought arrives, slower, the way the better ones always do.
Two of the three things I wrote in that blue book are now, somehow, my life. And honestly they just emerged without much dance and drama, layer by layer, while I was busy going about my life like anyone else. I did not actively chase those dreams. I forgot them. And yet they kept getting painted. By me. Haha, and even by others who appeared around me. Every time I picked up a brush I did not know I was holding.
When things were happening, I could never understand why or that a layer was being added. But everytime I looked back at my life, I could see it clearly.
We are wet paint, you and I. Wet paint mixes, it smudges, it smears, it even dries up. But it is wet. And it is meant to paint with.
People think life is a painting. It is not. The painting is what emerges. There are several. And we don't have just one canvas. We actually have unlimited paint, and we are surrounded by canvases. People, experiences, hard days, half-chances, the slow ordinary morning.
And whether you like it or not, you are paiting. Your life. So go ahead, make one more layer now. Stop. Come back tomorrow. Add another. Trust that the next coat can change things, or build on them.
My friend Ankita and I have been chewing on this all week. She put an angle on it I cannot stop thinking about. Most of the painters we still talk about had two attempts.
Bob Ross was a drill sergeant in the Air Force before he was the gentle man with the brush. His first attempt was someone else's. His second was his own.
Amrita Sher-Gil won a gold medal in Paris at nineteen. She could have stayed. She came home instead. Europe belongs to Picasso and Matisse, she said. India belongs to me. She died at twenty-eight. We are still looking at her paintings.
F. N. Souza got expelled from the Sir J. J. School of Art for joining the Quit India Movement. The school did not want him. He went and built the Progressive Artists' Group with five other young men who were not waiting for permission to make Indian modernism Indian.
The first attempt is the brief life hands you. The second one is the one you make on purpose, with what you have already become.
My first attempt was the brief I was handed. School, college, job, marriage, kids. I did it well enough. I am grateful for all of it. But sitting here now I can see, more clearly than I could see it then, that it was always the underpainting.
The blue book at twenty-one was not a dream I forgot to chase. It was the first sketch lines I put down before I knew I was painting. I have been adding layers ever since.
Five years of a youth program nobody paid me for.
One hundred and fifty caricatures drawn one a day for a WhatsApp group of fifteen people.
Letters that nobody asked for, written every Sunday for years. The kind of work everyone tells you to stop doing.
So if you are reading this in your own ugly or beautiful life stage right now, watching your colours getting muddied, watching the proportions shift, wondering what on earth you are even doing.
You are not behind.
You are not unfinished.
You are mid-layer.
The next coat can change everything. Believe that.
The painting is not waiting for you to be ready. It is teaching you, one stroke at a time, how to make it.
Your first attempt was what was handed out to you. What is your second attempt going to be? Or better still, ready to start applying the next layer?
Cooking this week. Dum biryani. Rice cooked separately. Onions caramelised slowly, the kind of brown that takes forty-five minutes and a lot of stirring. Marinade resting overnight. Layered in a heavy pot. Sealed with dough. Forty minutes on dum. You cannot rush a biryani. You cannot lift the lid mid-way. You build it once, layer by layer, and then you trust the heat to do the rest. We are painters in the kitchen too.
I will see you next Sunday.
As ever,
Adi
P.S. We are painters. Not inkjet printers. Difference: we build in layers.