Breaks (or no breaks)
The Diary of a Painter. By: Kamal Rajput
It began to build on me. One layer on another. The sticky feeling that I wished to shrug off. The past few months were quite taxing in terms of completing the paintings. What are painters if not manual labourers? So I have been thinking of taking a pause. I was worried though. Can I pick up from where I leave now? Won’t it be better to keep repeating the process to cement the newly acquired skills? Is it good or bad to leave something in the middle? Does taking a break help? I was inundated with such questions.
And to gain the clarity I swam against the current — from my stale Present and what-will-happen-questionmarked Future — into my past. Three years back I was writing something very passionately. It could have been a book. A collection of short stories. Fiction. And I love fiction. My first love. The stories came organically to me. I woke up and wrote. Not fast-paced, but one page a day. It was enough for me. I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad, and to be honest, I didn’t care much. A working professional, travelling from Delhi to Gurgaon, daily, five times a week, an average of 20 days a month. It was enough to render one exhausted for the next two days of weekend which generally vanishes away running errands for the coming working week.
I think I was writing way too fast. For the next three months, one page a day. During that time I thought of taking a small break from fiction! It was just the beginning of the writing and everything felt new to me and even I do not know if I was on the right track. A break won’t hurt. Just for a week!! Just a teeny-tiny break.
Little did I know that my “teeny-tiny break” would stretch out to be a long one and would last for the next three years. A polar bear hibernating in its lair, snoring, never to wake up from eternal, harsh winters. Today, getting back to writing requires tremendous effort, almost double the amount. I began with writing captions for my artworks and later picked up writing blogs. And I might never pick up the same book idea I had been working on previously, or maybe I will. Never say never. (Seven days in a week, seven stories, each on the name of the day).
The thought of taking a break from painting was unsettling. What if, I never come back to it? What if it was just another version of the break that I took from writing? After all, all the gridlocks in life would have the same epicentre and later one tragedy piling over another would come back haunting not for days or months but for years.
I have been painting relentlessly for almost two years now. Giving little breaks; making sure that the break doesn’t go beyond one week’s time frame. That I have the reference ready for my next project. The break should exceed more than a week.
I painted the first painting back in 2021. That was also the year when I started painting. Strangely after two years, I picked up the same subjects, in the same month: December; one in 2021 and the second in 2023. Not deliberately but a happy coincidence. I must say that I can see my work has improved a tad. Lol! A tad is fine by me. It’s more than enough. I don’t want great improvements, I don’t crave them. I can live by small continuous unseeable unnoticeable changes. Till the time there is no stoppage. No long breaks. The movement — my movement — from the world I painted for myself and the real world should be as brief as possible. The osmosis — my osmosis — should not exceed the threshold of the numbers I can count on my fingers.
Kamal is a Delhi-based artist. A writer and a painter. He is a Corporate Employee by day and an Art enthusiast by night.
Instagram: @a_bohemian_guy