Lakshmi Rameshwar Rao, Hyderabad
Rasool wanted to paint. “Everyone should paint,” his parents said approvingly, “and Rasool is talented.”
So Rasool started going to painting classes in the evenings after school. He was an eager student and learned quickly. He learned how to handle the brushes with care. He was taught that some brushes were good for thick strokes and others more suitable for fine strokes. He learned how to mix colours and keep the palate clean to spray and to sketch.
Rasool was soon a skilful artist. His pictures had the right foreground, the required background and well balanced proportions. He worked hard and practiced regularly. He drew pictures of houses and bridges, animals and birds, insects and flowers. He studied the complicated structures of the human body and reproduced them perfectly. But Rasool was not happy.
‘This is not painting’, he would think to himself and when he spoke out his thoughts aloud his mother would reassure him that it was indeed.
“You are too much of a perfectionist, she would say comfortingly, “that’s why you are not satisfied” and untrue he’d think to himself as he continued to draw his pictures with care and attention.
But this is not the painting I want to do he’d tell his father.
“You are too ambitious,” his father would say, “you are lucky to be in one of the best colleges of art,” and Rasool would remain silent for what his father said was both true and untrue. And yet there seemed to be more to painting than that.
Only Rasool’s teacher said over and over again, “Rasool you must look to find form. There is form in the formless and in the formlessness, there is form. You must look to find the essence Rasool. That essence you will find if you look not only at the outside but within yourself…,” and Rasool would argue that he studied his models in the greatest detail and she’d be silent.
“You really are very, very clever,” Rasool’s friends said admiringly when they saw his picture and they persuaded him to make souveniers and mementos, picture post-cards and greeting cards, portraits and landscapes for sale. Rasool’s work soon became very popular. He was an industrious worker. If there was a demand he could supply and he looked at his work. His pictures were really quite pretty and they sold adequately.
“Perhaps I’ll be happy if I sell more and more,” he would think to himself. But all his heart and all his mind told him that he was not painting the way he wanted to paint. He worked hard and established his style. “That’s Rasool’s,” people would say to one another.
Suddenly Rasool began to find that he no longer could work. His fingers grew stiff and his hands became numb. There is nothing wrong the doctors reassured him.
“Perhaps you are working too hard.” But Rasool knew that the reason lay elsewhere. He could not see but his eyesight was perfect. His head felt empty. He spent long hours gazing out of the window. The window framed a tree crown and he watched the branches sway in the breeze as it blew and became still again when it stopped. The green buds on the tree flared into a brilliant orange in summer. The flowers withered away and fell. A koyal had its nest in the tree top and Rasool looked as it sang into the rain.
One day Rasool received a message from his teacher. She had grown old now, she said, and needed help. Would Rasool be able to take art classes? Would he teach this boy, the carrier of this note? Rasool laughed to himself. What and how could he teach he wondered.
Years had gone by without his knowing it. He had not painted a single stroke. Others had perfected the art on his behalf and the business carried on. He, now a well-established name, wanted to learn to paint. Would his teacher teach him? And even as he sent his teacher the message his memory stirred and her words came back to him.
“You must look Rasool,’ he heard her repeat. “Paint it over and over again. Each day it will be different. Paint until what you paint, your painting and you are one.”
Rasool took the child’s water colours and crayons from him. He sat up in front of the window which framed the Gulmohar tree and began to paint.
