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Yesterday I was grinding lamp black for the outlines, sitting on the floor with the stone as always, and my daughter-in-law came and stood at the door and asked what I am cooking. Nothing is cooking, I said. It is only the soot. But she is right, the smell is there. I collect the soot from the mustard oil lamp in the prayer room, the one that burns through the evening aarti, and I keep it in an old Bournvita bottle for months before I use it. When I grind it with a little gum and water, the whole room becomes that smell. Mustard oil, a little burnt, little sweet. My mother did the same bottle, same lamp. She never measured anything. I also do not measure, and my son says this is why I cannot give a rate card for the work, and I tell him some things are not for rate card. Anyway, the outline on this peacock is going well. Fine as a hair. But I am thinking now the black from this year's soot is a shade warmer than last year's and I cannot decide if I am imagining it or if the oil is different. Anyone else here working with their own lamp black, kindly tell me if it changes for you also. It is a small thing but it is sitting in my head since two days.

I am working on a Madhubani piece for a buyer in Patna, fish pair around a lotus, and everything is fine except one thing. The eye of the left fish. In our tradition the fish eye is a small circle with a dot inside, and the outer line should be drawn in one breath, no joining. I have done it four times now and each time it comes out the same way, slightly heavy on the upper side, so the fish looks sleepy or maybe annoyed, not alert. My mother would have said the hand is thinking too much. The trouble is I cannot correct it by painting over. Paper is handmade, the black is lamp black mixed with gum, and any second coat sits on top like a patch, dull where the rest is deep. So I have to redraw the whole fish. Four fishes have gone into the waste pile near my charpai. My wife has stopped asking. What I am asking myself is whether a small heaviness in one eye is a fault at all, or whether I have been looking at it so long that I have lost the piece. Sometimes we keep only the one wrong thing in front of the eyes and the rest of the painting becomes invisible. If anyone has faced this with fine line work, the point where you cannot tell if it is a mistake or your own hand's character, I would like to hear how you decide to stop.

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, Mithila painter from Madhubani. All my life I sold through the cooperative or when someone came to the house. Tourists sometimes, or people from the city who heard about the village where the painting women are. My son, he is in Patna for his job, he took photos of maybe eight of my pieces, a fish with the lotus, a Durga, two peacocks, some others. He put them on WhatsApp status and also in some groups he is in. I did not think much of it. Now in the last month I have sent six paintings by courier. To Delhi. To Bangalore. To one address in Dubai even, a man whose mother is from Darbhanga originally and he wanted something for his wall. These people never touched the paper, never saw the pigment. They saw a phone photo and they trusted it. This is strange to me. In my market, the buyer wants to see the line work up close, wants to know the colour is natural, wants to hold it. But my son says this is how it works now. I am grateful, truly, but also I am thinking, what if the photo does not show the real thing? I use geru and rice paste and lamp black, the photo cannot show that. But the buyers are happy when the parcel arrives. I do not understand this new way but I cannot argue with the orders. Anyone else selling traditional craft online and feeling this same confusion?🙂

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.

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.

I am teaching Mithila painting to a small group in my village, mostly girls, on Sunday mornings in the room where my mother used to sit with her colours. One of them, Sunita, she is fourteen, she has been coming since two years. Very quiet girl, hardly speaking, but her line work is steady, better than some who have been doing longer. Today a lady from Patna who buys from our cooperative took one of her paintings. A small one, two fish and a lotus, on handmade paper, done with the black from lamp soot and the red from kusum flower. Two hundred and fifty rupees. Sunita's mother came to my house in the evening to tell me. She was holding the money folded in her blouse. She did not say much. I also did not say much. The thing is, when I was that age nobody gave us money for this. We painted on the mud walls before the wedding, we painted for the ritual, and that was all. The wall got whitewashed every year and the work went away with it. For long I thought that was the whole of it, that our painting was for the wall and for God and not for selling. I don't know what to feel sometimes. Half of me is happy that the girl has earned something of her own at fourteen. Other half is thinking, will she now paint only the small ones that sell fast, the fish and the peacock, and never learn the whole story of the Kohbar or the wedding of Shiva and Parvati which takes many days. It is a real worry for me. The market wants the easy ones. Anyway. I have told her next month we start the Kohbar, slowly, small portion everyday before she does any selling work. Let us see.

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.

I made black pigment in November, from lamp soot and the gum, the way my mother used to do it. Kept it in a glass jar with the cloth tied on top. Today I opened it and there is white fur on the surface, a thin layer. First time this has happened to me in so many years. My mother never had this problem. But she made small quantity, enough for one or two paintings, and it was finished before anything could sit. I made a big batch because a cooperative order was coming and then the order went slow. So the jar is sitting since four months and now this. Some people will say just throw it. I am not able to throw it, that soot took me three evenings to collect properly, sitting with the diya and the tin plate. I have scraped the top layer off. Underneath it looks fine, black as it should be. But I am hesitating to use it on the order, because if it comes off later on the paper then my name only will be spoiled, not the mould's. There is an old practice of putting a little neem leaf in the jar. My aunt used to do it. I did not do it this time because I was in a hurry, which is its own kind of foolishness. Anyone here working with natural pigment, does the spoilage go all the way through or only skin deep. I would like to know before I ruin good handmade paper.

For three months I have been fighting with the black. The soot I make from the lamp is good but it sits too heavy on the paper, it does not behave like the old black my grandmother used to get. She would not tell me her method fully, only laugh and say the tree knows. So this January I pressed a whole branch of pipal leaves under bricks on the roof. My wife thought I have lost my mind, leaves drying in the sun like that. Yesterday I ground them with a little water and the paste came out a deep green-black, and on the handmade paper it dries to a soft charcoal that takes the fine line beautifully. Not shiny, not flat. Like the leaves are still breathing under the line. I have been painting fish all morning with it. The border work especially looks better than anything I did last year with bought ink. My son says I am being sentimental but he is young, he does not understand that the pigment carries the memory of the tree. The line works because the colour has patience in it. Maybe I will press more leaves before the monsoon. The old methods are slow but they do not disappoint.

For the black in the paintings I do not buy anything. Lamp soot collected on a piece of tin over the diya, then that soot mixed with a little gum from the neem tree, and it is ground on a flat black stone with a small round stone in the hand. That stone was my mother's. She used it for maybe forty years, and before that I think her mother's sister used it, I am not fully certain. It is getting thin in the middle now. When I press, I can feel the dip where her hand went round and round. Some days I think I should keep it aside and buy a new one from the market in Darbhanga for the daily work, and save this one. But then what will I grind on? A stone sitting in a cloth on the shelf is not a stone any more, it is only a memory. My mother would have laughed at me for keeping it unused. She ground her kajal on it till the last year of her life and never once said this is precious, keep it safe. My son says I should photograph it and put the photo online so people understand the work. I do not know. A photo of a stone does not tell you anything about how the arm gets tired. The thing I am actually worried about is the dip. One day the stone will break through in the middle and then forty years of somebody's hand will just be two pieces on the floor. Any of you who work with old family tools, kindly tell me. Do you retire them or do you keep using till the end?

Since two weeks I am stuck on one thing and it is not the drawing, the drawing is fine. It is the black. In our work the black line is everything. Without it the fish is only a shape. But real black we do not buy in a tube. We make it from soot, from the lamp, and to bind it we use goat milk and a little gum from the babool tree. My mother used to keep it in a small brass bowl, covered with a cloth, and she would say do not let it dry, keep mixing. If the milk is more, the line becomes grey and faint like old writing. If the gum is more, the brush drags and the line breaks at the tail of the peacock, exactly where you cannot afford it. Yesterday I made a fresh batch and it came out wrong. Too thin. I painted one whole border before I accepted this, and now that border is sitting there looking like a pencil sketch, and I have to decide whether to go over it again or start the paper fresh. The paper is Sanganeri, not cheap, so I am not starting fresh. I am sitting with it. My mother never measured anything. She would dip her finger and know. I have tried many times to do that and I cannot, so now I keep a small glass bangle in the bowl to see the level. It is a poor substitute for her finger. Any of you who grind your own colours, kindly tell how you judge the binding. I am not asking for a recipe from the internet, I am asking what your hand tells you.

back leg snapped clean off, someone had tried to fix it with a wood screw and made it worse. i gave the woman two dollars and she looked at me like i'd done her a favor which, i guess, i had. it's sitting on my work table under a lamp right now. i keep not drawing it. that's the whole problem lately, everything i start comes out too neat, too resolved, like i'm illustrating the thing instead of looking at it. the chair doesn't resolve. it just sits there being broken and specific, the splintered end of the leg still pale where it snapped, the screw hole gone black at the edges. i've been photographing it from underneath for a week, which is a weird angle nobody would choose, which is probably why it's working. three of them are pinned up over the sink. my friend said they look like a crime scene. she's not wrong. anyway. making work about damage is easy to say and hard to actually do without turning the damage into a prop. this chair is teaching me the difference.