The pine tree
The free line is born and for a short time I disappear
At the end of my three years in Italy, I got a job in Dharamsala, North India, teaching Tibetan refugee children in the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts. Dharamsala is the seat of the Dalai Lama in exile and his government, and the Institute of Performing Arts was set up to preserve the traditional performing arts of Tibet, which are dying out and being sinicised in his homeland.
I spent months packing and repacking, trying to get everything down to the bare essentials. My Gandhian desire to be as minimalist as possible ended up with me arriving in Delhi with almost no suitable clothing, and I spent the first few weeks going to tailors to get shirts and trousers made. What I did have with me though were two precious leather-bound books. Before I left Italy I had gone to a shop tucked into the city wall half-way down a long flight of ancient stone steps, to a man who made leather-covered books to the size you wanted, in whatever paper you wanted. I had two.
One was full of beautiful smooth writing paper. The other was fat with the best quality watercolour paper Italy was making at the time (twenty years later I tried in vain to find any paper of this quality, and have never found it since).
And so it began.
Tired and groggy I open my eyes to see a sea of purple clouds stretching away to a violet line where they meet the orange of infinite space. It is sunrise over India. The clouds whip up in a strange dust storm towards the centre of the sun, great billowing bursts and snagged veils of turbulent monsoon, hovering frozen against a backdrop of white dawn. We drop down into their grey mist, flying low over green and red jagged land, rivers of ochre mud, craters of vermillion, flooded fields, clusters of houses, blocks of pale flats like lego abandoned on a building site. Everything is wet green running mud. Soon we are skimming so close I can almost hear the squelch of our wheels on the saturated earth and then a piece of wet tarmac, we bump, land, racing through puddles into green steam...
When I arrived in Delhi, I was met by my artist friend Ravindra Verma, who I had met when he was on a scholarship in Italy.
Ravindra had arranged for me to stay with a retired couple in the Gandhi Peace Foundation, a haven of peace in the centre of Delhi, with simple rooms and delicious vegetarian food. I spent my days in the silver bazaars, the Red Fort, the Gandhi museum. There, in a display case, the bullet that killed him, along with his few possessions. I took multiple copies of the Bhagavad Gita off the shelves and lined them up so that I could compare the translations, straining to imagine the Sanskrit original hovering in between the various English approximations. Ravindra took me to meet his artist friends at Triveni Kala Sangam, showing me contemporary Indian painting, accompanying me to classical concerts. Soon, though, it was time to leave. After a twelve hour overnight bus trip I arrived in McLeod Ganj, a tiny settlement just above the village of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, my new home.
I could tell a thousand stories about that time, but I’m here to talk about my vexatious art pilgrimage, which at this point takes an interesting turn. With very little education and no framework for understanding my desire to make art, I can see now that various cultural forces had conspired to create a belief in me that one day painting would simply come to claim me; that I would be seized by it, and after that I would just work all day every day, driven and guided by this holy purpose. In the end it turned out to be easier and gentler than that, though not so straightforward. In the actual world of my actual life, it turned out to be simply beauty that broke the spell.
I was sitting, awe-struck, in my room on the top floor of the Institute’s brand new accommodation for its students. The building was perched on the side of a mountain, looking down to the valley far below, with forests of rhododendron trees behind it reaching up to the snow peak at Triund. My little corner room was painted yellow. It had a red formica table and a chair, three shelves build into the wall, and windows on two sides. I was sitting on my bed, holding a steel mug full of tea, watching monsoon clouds, more or less level with my eyes, moving across a pink sky, when I spotted a small group of pine trees. They were shrouded in mist and cloud, just their feathery tops poking above the white. Soft graphite pencil on even softer watercolour paper, some kind of magic stepped over my confusion and resistance and I began.
It was hesitant, tentative, unsure. But unquestioning. At that moment something connected up. I had been trapped inside a dark silo of longing looking out at the world through a glass screen, unable to act, and now, for the moment at least, the glass was gone. Slowly, other drawings followed, my line gradually relaxing as I traced the outline of the mountain range above us, the curve of a white marble temple tower, the flapping of its red flag in the wind.
The line gradually became looser and looser until finally I felt like I was doing a kind of automatic drawing…
I only had to pick up my now cheap, bad quality paper (very freeing) and my pencil, point myself at something, and start…
Everything was easy, perspective took care of itself, proportions seemed to work out. My ‘free line’ had been born. I was beyond delight, not thinking, just inhabiting the feeling of having found the secret of my art and my life.
I would love to be able to say that after this my holy purpose was able to flow freely in the world; that I never looked back and have been happily creating ever since. But this is not an Instagram story, and not at all what happened next.
So beautiful! Those sketches are phenomenal.
Love this Tamsin - and those pine tree sketches - wow xxx