My black is soot from the diya and my sister keeps asking why I don't buy it ready-made
Every year after Diwali I collect the soot from the diyas in our house, and also from my mother's house, and my sister's. Stored in an old Bournvita jar, the glass one with the orange lid. Then for black in the painting, that is what I use. Bind it with gum from the neem tree, a little water, nothing else.
My sister says just buy the tube, same black, hundred rupees, no trouble. She is not wrong. But the tube black sits on the paper like a guest who has come only for the food. The soot goes in and becomes part of it. Same brush, same hand, different result, and I cannot explain properly why.
Trouble is the jar is nearly finished now, and Diwali is still far. I have one peacock border and the eyes of the fish to do on this cloth for a buyer in Patna and I am being slow with it because of this. Also the soot from last year is grainy at the bottom, I should have sieved it better before storing.
Any of you make your own black? Or I am the only one sitting here rationing a jar of festival smoke like it is gold.
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The Bournvita jar is the whole thing. You put the black in a jar that already held something your family drank, then it sits on the shelf all year next to the other jars, waiting. A tube comes from a factory, the jar comes from your mother's kitchen. That is not the same black at all, whatever the label says.
I work with salvaged material, whole rooms of other people's thrown-away things, and I have this argument with people constantly. They ask why not get new sheet metal, it is flat and clean and cheap. Because the dent was made by somebody. The neem gum bites into the paper in a way acrylic never will, it has a grain, it fails differently, it holds the light differently. Your sister is right that it looks the same from across the room. She is wrong that it is the same.
Keep the jar. Tell her the hundred rupees is for people with nothing to remember.
The dent was made by somebody. That is the whole argument, and it is a good one. Une bosse, a dent, is a record of a hand or a foot or a bad afternoon, and no press in a factory will ever give you that.
But I will push you a little on one thing. Salvaged material can carry meaning for free, and meaning is not the same as a painting. I have watched people hang on to a beautiful ruined object and never solve what to do with it. The dent has to earn its place in the picture, otherwise it is just a story sitting in the frame. The soot in that jar, though, that one earns it. Pigment that your family's own lamps made. Voilà. That is not sentiment, that is material with a history inside it.
You have pushed in the right place, ji, and I will not argue. A dent left sitting in the frame is only a memory with nowhere to go. I have seen also, in our own houses, old things kept on the shelf for years and nobody knows why, only that it cannot be thrown. That is not art, that is only sentiment, and you are right to separate them.
But this I will say from my side. For us the earning is not done by the painter's cleverness. The soot goes into the black of a fish, or the eye of a peacock, or the line of a deity. It is doing a job in the picture, not sitting beside it. My mother never explained it either. She only said, use what the house has given. Maybe that is the whole test you are asking about. If it has work to do in the drawing, it stays. If it is only there to be looked at and admired for itself, then better to keep it on the shelf and not in the painting.
"A guest who has come only for the food" is exactly it, ji. You have said in one line what I am trying for so long to say.
And the jar, you are right. My mother's kitchen shelf, that same jar, it has seen so many winters. Now the soot of this year's diyas sits inside it. When I open the lid, some smell also comes, faint, of the old powder and the burnt wick mixed. That also goes into the work, I feel.
About your sheet metal, I am agreeing with you fully. The dent was made by somebody, yes. New metal is flat and clean and has no history to tell. Same with my black. The factory black is correct, no doubt, but it is only correct. It does not remember anything.
Why the neem gum bites into the paper like that, I cannot explain in a technical way also. Only that it holds the soot, and the soot holds the line. 🙏