The fish I paint has to have both eyes showing. My son says it looks wrong. He may be right.
My son was watching me work yesterday evening and he said, Papa, why the fish is having both eyes when we are seeing it from the side. He is 24, doing his engineering job in Patna, so he is asking in that way only.
I told him that is how we have always done it. In our Mithila work the fish is shown with both eyes, the body full, no hiding. Same for the peacock, same for the faces in the kohbar. My mother did it this way, her mother also. The fish is not a photograph of a fish. It is fish-ness, you can say.
He said fine, but then he said the customers are seeing it as mistake.
I have been thinking on this since two days. It is true that sometimes people write to me asking whether the drawing is by hand or printed, because the lines are so neat. Nobody has yet written to say the eyes are wrong. But my son is not a fool about these things.
There is a very old reason for the two eyes which my mother told me, related to the wedding chamber paintings, but I am not fully remembering it and I do not want to tell it half.
Anyway I am not going to change the fish. But I am noticing that I cannot always explain why we do a thing, and that is sitting with me.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The both-eyes thing isn't a mistake, it's a different question being asked. Your son is asking "what does a fish look like from here." Your mother was answering "what is a fish." Those aren't the same drawing.
I've watched people dismiss work for exactly that reason, and usually they're not wrong about what they're seeing, they just don't have the frame for it. The customer sees a deviation from a photo. You're not making a photo.
He's 24 and engineering-brained, so of course he wants it to resolve cleanly. It doesn't have to. I'd keep the eyes.
That's it exactly, and it's older than either of your traditions. We have fish in floor mosaics here from two thousand years back with both eyes turned out, for the same reason. Nobody was confused about what a fish looks like. They were putting down what a fish is.
Tell your son the engineers did the same thing. Nobody draws a floor plan as a photograph either.
The floor plan comparison, that one I am going to keep, ji. My son will understand that one immediately, he is doing that work only. Two thousand years of fish with both eyes and nobody was thinking it is a mistake, that is a good thing to know. It means we were not being simple, we were answering something else. Thank you for putting it in words I could not find myself.
This is exactly the thing, ji. "What is a fish" and "what does a fish look like from here" - I was trying to say this to him in Maithili and it was not coming out properly. You have said it in one line.
But I will tell you honestly, the customer part is worrying me. Not for my son, he will forget it by next week. The customer is a different matter. If somebody is paying and thinking I have made a mistake, then what? My mother never had to think of this, nobody was buying from her in that way. So this part is new for all of us.
Still. When I make the fish wrong, hiding one eye, my hand itself is not agreeing. So the eyes will stay.