The Question Of Singularity

When I was six years old, I found happiness in dipping my hands into a carton full of wax crayons and scraping all over my home’s dull white walls. The lines of color that emerged in the wake of my stubby little fingers gave me a certain kind of joy that I never found anywhere else.

As I grew up, those expansive canvases shrank to become tattered pages of old school notebooks and small brackets of spaces in between questions from exam papers. I put pen to paper and let my hand travel on its own – perhaps with purpose, but most probably without… but it never lost its charm. I lost quite a bit of the three-dimensionality that accompanied a child’s mind, but I changed and I adapted, and I became an amalgamation of thought and perspective, originality extracted from substance preexisting, and along the way, created my own method and process of functioning and thinking – a process that is unique in its own way, just like anybody else’s is.

So basically, I found my own thing.

And therefore, when the question of singularity of process comes across, I find myself teetering on the edge of this wonderful thing called confusion because I believe in the uniqueness of thought and method, and the idea of there being only one form of working is simply implausible to my addled mind.

Artistic process, according to me, is a very idiosyncratic entity, subjective to an individual and how this individual works. Just like no two pebbles are exactly alike; there can be no identical progressions in thought and ideation. There is no enveloping description that finds commonality in all of them. The way a person renders thought to the proverbial canvas depends wholly on the person himself – he does not need to be coerced to follow a fixed way of thinking in any way whatsoever.

I work through drafts. I begin with my raw material and keep building on it, over and over, until I’m satisfied with what I end up with. I cannot end with spontaneity – it is my first step, but it is not the only one. I believe in refinement, and when I say ‘satisfied’, I do not mean wholly satisfied. I can never be completely happy with what I do. I always believe that I can do better. It’s not modesty, even though people say it is.

You can’t just put me in front of a canvas and ask me to paint. It might be perfect for some people, but it just doesn’t work for me. I don't roll that way. Everybody is wired differently. It’s not their fault that they don’t follow a prevailing pattern.

Artistic process is a flexible form, as fluid as foam, as distinct as a grain of sand. It’s not the same for everybody.

It does not need to be.