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Myself Ramesh. I want to say something that has been on my mind. In the old way, we make our own colours. Rice paste for white. Lampblack from the diya. The red from kusum flower or from geru, the earth. My mother she would grind these things for hours on the sil-batta, mixing with gum from the babul tree. The colour sits on the paper differently. It breathes. Now many students and even some senior artists are using poster colours from the market. It is faster. Also cheaper sometimes. But I look at those paintings and the line has no life. The colour is flat like plastic. You can feel no hand in it. One girl in my class last month she told me guruji natural colours take too long. I said beta that is not a problem. That is the art itself. The grinding, the mixing, the waiting, this is not wasted time. This is the painting. But I also understand. The buyers they want bright. They want quick. And we must eat. So I am conflicted ji. I use both now. Some natural for my own work, some synthetic when I must. But I feel a little shame mixing the two in one painting. Like I am cheating my grandmother. Anyone else feel this way about old materials vs new ones? Or is it only me.🙂

My son asked me yesterday why I don't just buy the ready made colours from the market, saves so much time he says. I tried to explain but maybe I did not say it properly. You see, when I grind the stone and the vegetable dye myself, I am not only making paint. I am doing what my mother did, and her mother before her. The motion of the stone on the stone, it is like a prayer. The smell of the turmeric, the red from the beetle nut leaf, it brings the whole room into the old time. The ready bottles are fine, they are convenient, I do not judge anyone. But my grandmother used to say the colour carries the hands that made it. A fish painted with a colour you ground yourself, it has a life in it. Also there is a practical thing. The store colours fade fast in our sun. The natural ones, they deepen with age. I have a painting from my mother that is forty years old and the peacock blue is richer now than the day she finished it. You cannot buy that in a bottle. Maybe I am old fashioned. But I think some things are worth the extra hour.

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.

Today I ground the neem leaves with the stone. My grandmother used to say the paste must rest two nights before you strain it, otherwise the green comes out thin and quarrelsome. Three days this time. The colour that came out is deep, almost black-green, and it sits on the handmade paper different from any tube colour. It has a weight in it. People ask why we do the slow way when the market has everything ready. I tell them the old colours have the season inside them. This neem, it came from the tree behind my sister's house in Darbhanga. The paper is from Saurath, the same mill since my mother's time. Nothing about this painting is in a hurry. The fish and the lotus are done. Now the peacock's tail is waiting and I am letting the colour settle. Some days the work is not about the hand, it is about the patience. I am learning this again every time.

Namaste to all. A question I am wanting to ask this group. Few years back I had sent my paintings to one gallery in the city. They liked the work, this is not the issue. But then they told me, Ramesh ji, can you please make the same fish and peacock in more bright colours, more modern feeling, because the buyers are liking that only. My natural colours are from flowers, ochre, lamp black, from the old method. I said no, kindly I will not change. They did not take the work after that. So I am asking. Have you ever been asked to change something in your work for a show or a gallery? The colour, the size, the subject, the frame? And what did you do, you agreed or you refused? I refused and I am still wondering sometimes if I was doing the right thing. Tell me your story ji. I want to hear how others are handling this.

Myself Ramesh. I paint Mithila, as my mother and her mother taught me. Natural colours only, turmeric yellow, indigo blue, vermilion, so on. A gallery in Delhi some years back said they liked my work very much but could I please use "more contemporary palette" they said. I was confused ji. These colours are the tradition. They carry meaning. I cannot change simply because somebody wants something else. I said no. And they moved on. Now I wonder, has any gallery asked you to change something fundamental about your work? The colours, the subject, the size, the medium. And did you do it, or did you hold your ground? I am curious to know. 🙏

People ask me where I get my green and I tell them, from the neem tree behind my house, and they think I am joking. But it is true. We boil the leaves since my mother's time, and before that my grandmother, to get the deep green for the leaves of the peacocks. The tree is older than me. Every year when the rains come I take my granddaughter out with the basket and we pick the young leaves together, and she asks why we do not just buy the bottle from the shop like everyone else. I say to her, because the tree gives it free, and it gives it the right colour, the colour that has been in our paintings for generations. The shop green is flat. This green moves. Yesterday I was grinding the indigo and I thought, I have spent my whole life making colours from what is around me. Mud, turmeric, the lamp black from the clay diya. Nothing is bought. And still sometimes a foreign collector pays more for a small painting than the whole month of my father's salary used to be. Strange world. The neem is flowering now. After the flowers the fruit comes, and then the young leaves again. I will not be here forever but the tree will still be giving its green to whoever asks for it.

One gallery in Delhi, they told me, "Can you make the colours less bright? The international buyers like it more muted." I said ji, these colours are our tradition, the red and yellow are for the goddess, I cannot dim them. They did not take my work. I was not sorry. Has any gallery asked you to change something that felt wrong to change? Not just a small thing, something that changes the work itself. Did you say no? Do you ever regret it?

Someone asked me for an edition of 30, 3 colours, on Fabriano Rosaspina, 50x70. I said 900 euro without thinking, because that is the number that came out of my mouth, and it felt reasonable in the moment. Then I went home and actually counted. Paper was 210. Three screens, so three emulsion coats and three registration setups, and I always burn one screen twice because I am not as good as I pretend. Ink is nothing, maybe 40. The real cost is the drying time between colours, which is two days where the studio is half occupied and I cannot start anything else on that table. Plus the edition does not come out at 30. It comes out at 30 plus the ones I reject, and I reject more than I want to admit, and the client only pays for the 30. So 900 is roughly 11 euro an hour if nothing goes wrong. It always goes a little wrong. The thing I keep turning over is not the number, it is that I cannot raise it now. If I come back next week and say actually it is 1400, I look like I did not know my own work, and there is something worse in that than in being underpaid. So I am eating it. And then the next person will ask, and I will say 900 again, because that is now what I charge. I know the correct answer is to have a price list and stand behind it. I have a price list. I just do not believe it when I say it out loud. Curious if anyone here has actually managed to go back to a client and correct the quote, and how that went, because I am considering it and I feel sick about it.

A man at the mela stall yesterday watched me grinding my own pigment for a while and then told me very kindly that I should buy tube colours, because my work would look "more finished" and "sell better." He meant well, I think. He said the buyers nowadays want the bright flat colours. I told him kindly that this paint I am making, from the leaves and the lamp black and the haldi, this is not decoration. This is the painting itself. My mother ground the same way. Her mother also. You remove that, you have only a picture left, the soul is gone. He nodded and walked away. But the thought stayed with me all evening. Sometimes people think they are giving you a business advice when they are only telling you to stop being who you are. I will keep the grinding. It is slow, it stains the fingers, it is worth it.

This happened two weeks ago. A woman messaged me on WhatsApp, very polite, and she was interested in a Kohbar piece I had finished, the wedding painting with the sun and the moon and the lotus, all traditional. She asked the size, the price, all fine. Then she said, "Can you tell me what colours exactly are in it? I need to see if it will match my apartment's vibe." My son was standing there, I showed him the message. He laughed. I sat for a minute. This painting is about marriage, about fertility, about the gods witnessing a union. The colours are what they are, the red from the palash flower, the black from the soot, the yellow from the turmeric. They come from the earth, they are not chosen for a vibe. I told her, very respectfully, that the colours are natural red, yellow, black, some green from leaves. She said okay and asked if I could change the background to white and make the peacocks blue like "navy blue" instead. I said no, I cannot do like that, this is a traditional piece, the peacock has his proper colours in our work. She didn't buy it. Of course. I am still thinking about this. Not angrily. I understand she is from a different world. But I am realising that online, people are not looking for the thing itself. They are looking for something that fits into their already-made life. The painting is not an object with its own story, it is a decor item that must match the sofa. My question is not to complain. I just want to know, for those of you who make traditional or folk work, how do you handle this? When the buyer wants the art but does not want what the art actually is. Do you adjust and survive, or do you hold the line and lose the sale? I am torn.

Today I ground my own green from the neem tree behind the house. My mother used to do this same thing, pluck the leaves, dry them in the shade for three four days, then grind with a little lime to hold the colour. The shade it gives is not bright, not like the market green from a tube. It is dull, dusty, like the underside of a leaf. But when you put it on the paper next to the vermilion it wakes up somehow. That is the thing nobody tells you about natural colour, it needs its neighbours. Alone it looks dead. Put it beside the red, beside the lampblack, and it starts to talk. I was thinking how many years I have been doing this and still the first hour of grinding feels like a waste. Paper dust and powder going everywhere, the colour looking weak, and you think, this is nothing. Then you mix it and you remember. Every single time the same doubt. My grandmother used to say the colour decides whether it will work for you, and you just have to ask politely and wait. She was right, I think. Maybe that is also the whole lesson of this art. You cannot rush the leaf.🙏

Last year in Madhubani, marriage season was coming and a family from Darbhanga came to me. They wanted a large Mithila piece for the wedding wall, traditional, with the sun and moon, the fish, the bridal procession. I told them ₹8,000 for the whole thing, handmade paper, natural colours from my own stock, ten days' work minimum. They said they would think about it. Next week I heard they went to a younger fellow in the next lane. He does the work too, learned from his aunt, but he charges ₹4,000. He uses poster colour, not geru and rice paste. And the paper is machine-made. But it is half my price, so they went to him. I am not angry at the boy. He is feeding his family. But this is the thing, when your own neighbour will do it for half, the customer does not see the difference between handmade pigment and a tube from the market. They see two paintings that look somewhat same, and they pick the cheap one. My son tells me I should raise my prices even more, because the people who understand the difference will pay. But the people who understand the difference are fewer every year. The ones coming to buy are often new money, wanting a "Mithila painting" to hang on the wall like a thing, not knowing what they are looking at. So I am stuck. ₹8,000 is already not much when you count the grinding of the colours, the preparation of the paper, the days of sitting. But I cannot compete with ₹4,000 and poster colour. And I don't want to compete that way either. How do you hold a price for the real thing when the market does not know what real means anymore?

Myself Ramesh, doing Mithila painting. I want to ask one thing about colours but first I will tell what happened. For the peacock body I use a blue from the nil plant, dried and powdered by my own hand. Old stock was finished. New batch I got from a man in Darbhanga and the blue is coming out flat, like the blue of a plastic bucket, no depth at all. I mixed with a little of the black from lamp soot and the whole thing went grey and dull. Today I took handmade paper, that sheet I keep only for testing colours, and I painted the whole thing over with the new blue in different strengths, twelve patches, one to twelve. Still nothing. The old blue in my mind is the colour of a peacock neck in shade, deep but alive. This one is only sitting there on the paper, doing nothing. Trouble is I have the full border already done in the old blue, fine line, three days of work, and the peacock body will come in the middle. If I use new blue it will not match and the whole painting is spoiled. If I wait for old stock, maybe months, maybe never. Someone told me to use the acrylic blue from the market. Colour will be correct but for me it is not the same work then. Anybody else faced this with natural pigment, one batch gone and the new one not matching? How you manage? I am not asking for sympathy only, I want to know what to actually do.

Myself Ramesh, I am finding the colours are shifting so beautifully now. The geru mitti, which is red earth, it becomes like a warm orange when the sun hits it directly on the handmade paper. And the deep green from the neem leaves, it gets a touch of blue. It is a different light in the studio these days, a softer light. The peacocks are looking especially vibrant this afternoon. It makes me feel grateful for this process, ji.

Spent half an hour at the supplier's table today holding the sample plate up to the window, then under the desk lamp, then back to the window, then outside on the pavement like an idiot. Kept saying to the man the blue is too green. He kept saying it is the same blue as last time. It was not the same blue as last time. Ordered a kilo anyway because he had it in the older batch and once that batch is gone it's gone. The piece I'm making is the sea wall down at the old port, the bit where the concrete is patched with three different greys and the winter storms have eaten the mortar out. I have been collecting blues for it since March. There is a blue in the early morning there, maybe ten minutes of it before the light turns hard, that is not teal and not grey and I cannot describe it without sounding like a poet, so instead I am buying kilos of glass and losing my mind. Everyone thinks this job is about patience. Actually it is mostly about this. Standing in a shop arguing about whether a colour exists. Anyway. The kilo cost more than I'll get for the panel. I know. Don't.

A man at the garden centre watched me inspect three identical sedum plants for several minutes and felt moved to inform me that they were, in fact, all the same variety. I thanked him and explained I was checking the leaf colour against a specific hue. He told me I was overthinking it. The leaves were green, he said, and that was that. I held up two leaves side by side and pointed out that one had a distinctly bluer cast, which would matter for the study I'm preparing. He looked at me blankly and repeated that they were the same, and I should just buy one. I did not buy any of them. I bought nothing at all, in part out of principle and in part because I no longer trusted my own judgement in that aisle. The frustrating part is not the man himself. He was harmless, if tedious. It's that I let him make me doubt my own eyes for a full two minutes afterward. At 47, after a scientific career and two decades of painting, I still second-guess a perfectly accurate observation because a stranger decides it's fussiness. I should know better by now. I keep telling myself I will stand firmer next time, and then I don't.

One time a gallery person looked at my Mithila paintings, natural colours, hand-ground, the way my mother and grandmother taught me, and said could I make them brighter? More modern? Like acrylic maybe. I was standing there holding a brush and I did not know what to say ji. I thought about it for many days. In the end I did not change. But I have wondered since if I was foolish. What is the thing a gallery asked you to change about your work, and did you do it or did you walk away? I am asking because I still think about this sometimes.

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

For thirty years I have been buying my green pigment from the same man in Darbhanga. He passed away last month. His son is there but the colour is not the same, too bright, like a plastic toy. So this morning I went out myself and picked neem leaves and some others I know, dried them in the sun, ground them with a little copper on the stone. Took me three hours to get a shade I would call right. My hands are green. My daughter was laughing at me. But when I put it on the paper it is the colour of the peacock's neck the way it should be, not that chemical thing. I know most people will just buy a tube. But this art was never about convenience. The colour has a memory when you make it yourself.