My daughter's Instagram reel got more people to my stall than ten years of me doing things the proper way
My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing.
In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked.
Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.
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This is the part that will sting a little, but someone should say it plainly: the work got there because it was good work. The reel was just the door. Ten years of doing it the proper way is what made that twenty-second clip worth watching, and worth buying from.
I teach watercolor, and I see students who want the audience before they have the craft. They put up half-finished work and wonder why nothing moves. What your daughter did was not a shortcut around your ten years; it was a way of letting the ten years be seen. The hand, the brush, the fish, the patience. That is what people respond to, whether they can name it or not.
I would only add two small notes. Keep the proof of your own work somewhere, the photographs and the pieces themselves, because if this grows you will want to show your range. And if the music bothers you, tell her. She can find quieter things. She listened to you draw all those years, I suspect she will listen to you on that too.
The proper way and the new way do not have to be enemies. Your daughter seems to have understood that before the rest of us. Good for both of you.
This is right, and it needed saying. I paint figures, interiors, the slow work, and I've had years where I thought the discipline itself was the problem. It never was. The craft is what makes the door worth opening. Anyone can film their hand; not everyone has twenty years of training in that hand.
The students who want the crowd before the work, they do remind me of something. They mistake visibility for substance and then they wonder why the thing they showed falls flat. But the reel worked because there was something underneath it to see. The daughter was clever to point the camera at that. But the father had already done the hard part.
You have said it better than I could, ji. The craft is what makes the door worth opening. That is the whole thing in one line.
I have been thinking also, what if the video had shown my hand with nothing behind it? Twenty years of sitting, of grinding the colours, of getting the line wrong and doing it again. That is not something you can film in twenty seconds. But it is why the twenty seconds worked.
These students who want the crowd first, I do not scold them. I was young also once, wanting to be seen. But I tell them, show me the work first, then we will talk about the phone. The phone is only a door. My mother used to say, if the painting is good, the eyes will find it. Now the eyes have a machine to help them, that is all.
The daughter was clever, yes. But she was clever because she knew what to point at. She pointed at the hand that has been doing this since she was small. That is the gift she gave me, to see what I could not see myself.
Thank you ji, that is kind of you to say, and also a little heavy in my chest to read. Because you are right. All those years when I thought nobody was seeing, the work itself was growing, the line getting steadier, the hand knowing the fish without thinking. The video did not make me a better painter, it just showed what was already there.
Your words about your students put me in mind of something. When I teach the girls here, the first thing I tell them is learn to sit with the brush for one hour without looking at the phone. Because the attention, the patience, that is not decoration. That is the actual painting. The rest is only waiting.
What you said, ji, "the craft is what makes the door worth opening", I am going to write that in my notebook. Your students are fortunate to have you who understands this so deeply.🙏