 A
Pilgrimage of Images 2/3
As for the project's particular outcomes, first
of all, I will gather the fuel to make more paintings. Let me speak
for a moment about what these paintings do, even before they leave
the house. For ten years, a range of groups has been gathering in
my home to hear the "stories" of the paintings: the nearby
university students in courses such as Women and Creativity, other
artists in the regional Blue
Ridge Arts Association, fifth-graders from a local elementary
school, or the kindergarteners from Rainbow Riders school. What
I do when I use the first painting I talk about is to teach people
how to gain confidence in visual literacy, how to begin to read
the dialogue of ideas in a visual story.
Each painting works as if it were a conference panel, with its speakers
the makers of the objects I have painted, the practitioners who
use the ritual objects, the people whose childhoods are structured
by the festivals and dramas of different rites of passage into different
conceptions of validity. I bring these "speakers" into
an internal dialogue as some of the authorities and masters of their
cultures' traditions.
The potter who prefers Bagmati or Yamuna or Mahaweli
Ganga mud for the qualities associated with the deities of those
particular rivers; the marriage chamber's wall painter, who inherited
her designs from her grandmother; the cloth-dyer, who dries the
pomegranate peel, indigo stems and turmeric root necessary to achieve
the color green; the cloth scroll painter, who has trained for his
whole life by copying his father's scrolls and following their troubadour
trail (since the paintings are unrolled and their stories sung);
the doctor who counts his intentions and his mind among the ingredients
in his hand-pressed "precious" pills; the jeweler whose
propitiative ritualizing of the encasement of a wild elephant's
hair in silver or gold achieves an amuletic containment; the cremation
assistant who knows he is not only tending a fire but assisting
a liberation: these artists are the real storytellers and experts
assembled in my paintings, and, in a dialogue with them, I am able
to suggest to my group of visitors that, in their own lives, they
consider what is their own deep dowry, their own conceptual inheritance,
their own ability to achieve tone and hue, and their own potential
inflections of poison or medicine into their relationships and work.
 I
tell my visitors that, over the years, I have written pages and
pages about my paintings for friends, for talks and exhibition notes,
for a book a few years down the road. Sometimes, in these essays,
I explain the symbolism of a particular detail or object unfamiliar
to most Americans, because so many things in India, Nepal, and Sri
Lanka are not just "dry" things. They are soaked in ideas,
or, if you will, they are sticky objects, that carry with them a
whole social history in which forms, roles, and definitions of art
have evolved.
Or, in my writing, I remember an artist whose work I have quoted-Frida
Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Ganga Devi, or the nameless amazing craftspeople
and practitioners who are such impromptu teachers-and I admire their
perseverance, and explain how they are lineage-holders of the logic
and assumptions which honor ornament, old traditions and rituals,
shrines, relics, and sacred objects. I confide in my visitors that,
though I know some people doubt whether it is possible, I have many
detailed, vivid memories from before I turned three, and my fascinations
even then were with color, complicated patterns, curves, and symbols,
such as the love-knot I observed my grandmother doodling on the
notepad by her telephone in 1960.
 That
love-knot, I point out, now accompanies Buddhist symbols such as
Manjushri's sword of wisdom (which cuts through ignorance) as part
of the lama-cushion's gold design in my most recent painting, Amchi,
and I thereby model the will to incarnate and recontextualize traditional
forms and values within my own work. Or, as another example of bridging
between painted forms and their implications, in the series I call
The Tank Paintings, I tell my visitors
about the twelfth-century Sri Lankan king, Parakrama, who decreed
that no drop of rain should fall but that it should be of benefit
to all the people. And so, in a golden age of social generosity,
workers carved water-gathering depressions into the great rocks
of Sri Lanka. One source, the rain, would fill them, and then laboriously
engraved channels would distribute the water. In my series of water-tank
paintings, raw silk squares represent those tanks, which become
gathering places for some of the regional art forms, the crafts,
or the practices I have admired in South Asia (as you can see in
accompanying plate #13, Khatwanga Tank).
Compositionally, then, I take these forms, crafts, and practices
back to a source where they can "find water," and, hopefully,
have their significance refreshed, which is my own glyphic way of
paying respect to King Parakrama's royal impulse.
In many ways, my presentations at home and my work in local public
schools is not so different from the more conceptual presentations
I do at conference centers such as David Fideler's Concord
Grove Educational Center of West Michigan or in university settings
such as the colloquy for international students at Virginia
Tech (see these two invitations among the supplementary letters).
In these public talks, to which I always bring some of my paintings,
I know I am not replacing or displacing a gallery as the center
of talk about art, but opening commerce elsewhere; making a living
contact between South Asian people whose voices and forms may be
under-represented in the western mind, and people in the west, where
makers of forms have become largely invisible or marginalized by
the rush of commercial manufacture.
For both South Asian and western audiences, some of the negative
effects of (perhaps unconsciously) relegating the craftsperson to
the status of laborer can be undone when, in my presentations, it
is the craftsperson with his or her hand-made objects (now working
in my paintings) who "speaks" to Appalachian school children.
These are children who, as one local principal put it, are the children
of the working poor, of coal miners, for example, in whose homes
are few books, and fewer stories of travel (in fact, I've asked
her to write one of my references so you could hear a bit about
this side of my work). This "living contact" is an important
part of the art I make, very different from the cooler transmission
of images closed off into coffee table books or the trophy-like
impression given by a single color enlargement framed and hung under
UV protective glass.
The video footage that my travel partner and I film and edit into
public television documentaries is also a crucial component of my
art. The globally homogenizing influence of American television
almost always threatens cultural difference, or what anthropologist
David Mayberry-Lewis calls "cultural survival." And yet,
something different happens, for both western and eastern audiences,
in response to footage of South Asian artists, markets, homes, trade-routes
cutting through the Himalayas, festivals and school children; places
of rare and endangered animals, such as snow leopards and tigers,
and places of common animals, such as peacocks, cobras, and leeches;
cities and villages, congestion and conversation, waste and renewal;
and, critically, of westerners among these people, westerners listening.
I am a pilgrim among pilgrims, between and in these places, and
then, the images I juxtapose and present in my paintings go on a
kind of pilgrimage of their own. For instance, in my paintings,
South Asian images come to American school children, and then the
video footage of American children seeing South Asian images in
my paintings goes to South Asia. I am committed to public television
work as one outcome of my travels and my art, and look forward to
more collaborations with my friend Jenna Swann, in which we can
match video images to verbal insights. (Perhaps Ray Kass's reference
letter - he is Professor of Art and gallery director at nearby Virginia
Tech - will testify to these ideas in relation to my 2002 exhibition.)
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