The day I had to tell my student her colours were wrong
Yesterday a young girl came to me with her Mithila work and she had used a bright purple from a tube for the lotus. She was so proud, and the drawing was good, her lines were clean. But I had to tell her no, this is not our colour. She looked at me like I had scolded her for nothing.
I tried to explain. In our tradition, we do not have purple. We have red from the kusum flower, yellow from turmeric, blue from indigo, black from soot. The lotus is red or pink or sometimes white, but not this purple. She said but it looks nice, and she was right, it did look nice. But it is not Mithila.
This is the thing that troubles me these days. I am not against new things. When I was young I also wanted to try new colours. But the old way, it has a reason. The natural colours are not just colour, they carry the thing itself, the earth, the flower, the root. When you use a purple from a tube, you lose that connection. The painting becomes decoration only, not ritual.
I let her keep the purple lotus in the end but I asked her to do another one with proper red, and to tell me the difference after. She is young, maybe twelve. I want her to stay with this art but also to understand why the old rules are there before she decides to break them.
Sometimes I feel like a strict grandfather when I say these things. But this is our heritage, not just any painting.
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oh man this one got me. i feel for both of you honestly, i can picture her face and i can also picture you having to say it and hating every second of it.
i'm a painter too (watercolor/gouache) and i think about this tension a lot. like there's this thing that happens when you train classically where you start to see color as belonging to a tradition, not just looking nice. and then someone who hasn't been trained yet just picks what they like and it works on a different level. she wasn't wrong that it looked good. but you also weren't wrong that it wasn't Mithila.
i don't have an answer but i wonder, did you show her examples after? like older work where she could see the red lotus and go ohhh that's why? or is that too much for one conversation
This is such a thoughtful take and I think you've put your finger on exactly why it stings for everyone involved. That gap between what feels right to the eye and what the tradition actually asks for, it's real, and it's not simple.
I work with watercolour too and I feel this in my own way. I paint old Bangalore houses, the ones with the teak columns and Madras terrace roofs, and sometimes I look at a reference photo and think, that wall would look lovely in a certain blue. But I know the house was lime-washed ochre, not blue, and if I change it just because it looks nice, I'm almost... lying? About the thing I'm trying to document? But it's a painting, not a photograph, so who decides.
It's the same knot. You can feel for the student and also feel for the teacher without anyone being the villain. Hard conversation to have to have.
Yes, you have understood it exactly ji. That is the whole thing, she was not wrong, and I was also not wrong. But in that moment we were both feeling like the other one was being unfair.
You are a painter also, so you know this feeling. When you are looking at that old house with the lime-washed ochre, you know what colour belongs there. Not because it is more beautiful, but because it is true to the thing. The house was built that way, the wall was made that colour by someone's hands, and it has a history. If you put a different blue on it just because it pleases the eye, you are painting a different house altogether.
That is what I was trying to tell her. The lotus in Mithila is not purple because we never had purple. Our grandmothers did not have a purple flower in their mind when they drew the lotus. They had the red one from the pond near the village, or the pink one from the temple tank. The colour comes from the memory, not from the tube.
But I also felt bad because she is young and she is trying. She will learn, I think. She came back today and showed me a lotus in red turmeric colour. She said, like this? And I said yes, like this.🙂
Yes, you have understood it exactly ji. That is the whole thing, she was not wrong, and I was also not wrong. But in that moment we were both feeling like the other one was being unfair.
You are a painter also, so you know. When you train in a tradition, the colours stop being just colours. They have meaning. Red is not just red, it is marriage and shakti and the kusum flower my mother used to collect in the morning. Purple is not part of that world. But to a young girl with a tube, purple is just a pretty colour, and why should it not be?
I told her we can use the purple for something else, for a border maybe, where it does not break the tradition of the lotus. She was not fully happy but she agreed. I think that is the best we can do sometimes, meet somewhere in the middle without losing what is ours.