The soul of an artist as an aura

I wonder how many of us are walking around with the trace of an aura that our bodies have forgotten they once held. Representation pic

On Monday morning I went to the post office since I needed to send two important documents to the India Art Foundation. The counter is usually managed by a white, middle-aged woman with flamboyantly painted fingernails. She's a German speaker, though she's also fluent in Italian. This time, however, there was a younger man I'd never met before, closer to my age, clearly an Italian speaker. When he heard me conversing with my partner and child in English, he intuitively made the switch so that we could communicate more effortlessly. After asking routine questions related to the business of sending my documents, as he was processing my order, he asked if I was an artist.

He must have made such an inference after glimpsing the envelope's addressee, an arts organisation. I was momentarily silenced. I generally refer to myself professionally as a writer. I felt unsure about claiming ‘artist' as a vocation, especially given how terribly I paint or the fact that I once even failed drawing. But my conscious mind reminded me that I have successfully created art on multiple occasions.

Later I realised I even currently have two artistic works as part of a significant exhibition at Kunst Meran that had been placed within eyeshot of an artwork by Adrian Piper, one of the most audacious and exciting intellectual and artistic minds functioning within contemporary art and philosophy. I told him I was an artist. He said, "It must be difficult to be an artist in such a small town." I agreed. Then he asked if I may have been part of an exhibition somewhere. I told him I had last shown something in Innsbruck last year. I asked if he was perhaps also an artist. He looked shyly towards the register he was handling and explained that if friends asked him to make a drawing, then he acquiesced, but he didn't otherwise pursue art. "I lost my artist soul a long time ago," he said, in the manner of a confession.

The exchange reminded me of a conversation with Alexia, who mans the counter at the Hofstätter winery. My father-in-law had introduced me to her soon after we had moved here because she fluently speaks German, Italian and English. She was also to be my point of contact if ever I needed wine for cooking, as her job predominantly involved recommending bottles of wine for clients to sample. When we got chatting once and I told her the kind of work I do, she got excited. She told me that she had studied art in Vienna. I remember feeling envious, because I've always held myself back from exploring art because of my inability to draw or paint. When I meet anyone who had enough talent to be accepted into an art school, I always wonder what stopped them from pursuing art full time. Alexia confessed that she doesn't feel inspired enough to make art. She speculated that she would need to live outside of Tramin for a while in order to find a subject or a muse. Had she also lost her artist soul? I wondered.

Also Read: A case for making time for self

Then I thought about the column I had written recently, in which I had theorised that being a writer was about inhabiting a state of consciousness, not necessarily about publishing bestselling books or even writing books. If you were your primarily or only audience, that was also enough for you to qualify as a legitimate writer. But is sustaining an artistic consciousness linked to maintaining a certain practice? And what does practice mean? I really love the word riyaz, which is so intricately linked to Indian classical musical traditions, the notion that you are expected to use your instrument daily, that it needs to be exercised in order to become stronger or better, or to build its capacity. How could this translate for artists and writers? I wondered, also, whether a significant part of holding a creative vocation had to do with feeling seen by others. Which is not necessarily the same as external validation. I imagine it more as being able to relate to other people who might practise the same vocation. But then, how does that translate for those who function from the margins, and therefore are compelled to befriend certain forms of solitude as well as alienation?

I tried to imagine the artist's soul as a kind of colourful aura that surrounds a person with creative proclivities. Does it diminish or dissipate when the person refuses to acknowledge its existence, or make gestures to sufficiently nurture it? What happens when the aura is diffused, does it leave behind a certain sadness or melancholy or a void? And if so, how many of us are walking around with the trace of an aura that our bodies have forgotten they once held?

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com.
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.