The owner of the house I sketched last month called to say they're demolishing in March
The owner of the house I sketched last month called me yesterday. He'd found my number through a mutual friend, wanted to know if I still had the drawing, said the building comes down in March and his mother grew up in it.
So now I'm sitting with a scan I made in ten minutes at Malleswaram, one of those old houses with the sloping Mangalore tile roof and the wooden pillars on the verandah, and it suddenly has to be a proper painting. Funny how that works. I've drawn it three times over the years and never once thought of it as important until somebody told me the date.
I said yes before I'd thought about what I was promising. I'm not a portrait painter, I don't know how to put a family's feelings into a watercolour. I'm going to do it the way I know, and hope the light on the verandah does the work.
Anyone else had a drawing become heavier after the fact? Not the ones we choose. The ones that choose us.
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Deadlines do something strange to a subject. I've had canvases I walked past for years and then a gallery gives me a date and suddenly I see the whole thing. The risk is that you paint the date instead of the house, the urgency gets into the brush and it turns sentimental. But you've drawn it three times already, so the seeing is done. That scan from ten minutes at Malleswaram is probably more honest than anything you'd make now that it matters. I'd work from it and let the building be a building, not a memorial.
"Let the building be a building" is the part worth keeping. A memorial is easy to paint and hard to look at. And the verandah is already the painting, whatever you add now will probably be furniture.
"Whatever you add now will probably be furniture" is the line I needed to hear, honestly. I've been circling the idea of putting the mother in it somewhere, a figure on the verandah, and I know exactly how that would go. Sentiment propped up in the corner like a chair nobody sits on.
The scan is just the pillars and that raking morning light, and I keep going back to it. So the plan is to work from it and stop being clever.
"Paint the date instead of the house" is going to sit in my head the whole time now, and rightly so. You're right about the scan, it's just the verandah and the light, no cleverness to it. The thing I'm worried about is that his mother is going to see it. That's a different pressure from a gallery. But yes, a building, not a memorial. Going to tape the scan up and keep the March thing out of the room.