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Every time I sit down to a fresh sheet, handmade paper, the one I like from the Srikrishna batch we got last year, I tell myself I will do something new this time. A different composition. Maybe the wedding scene I have been thinking about since my niece's marriage last month. But my hand, it goes to the dhaan. The paddy stalks. That old motif curving from the corner, the grains full and heavy, dropping toward the bottom edge. My mother used to say it is not decoration, it is a prayer, for the land, for the stomach, for the season coming right. I put it in even when the painting is about Durga or the fish or the tree of life. Sometimes I hide it small behind a border so only the person who looks carefully will see it. My grandmother told me once: if you paint the dhaan enough times, the goddess will recognise your hand and bless your harvest. I was a boy then, I thought she meant the rice harvest. Now I understand she meant the harvest of your life itself, what you have grown, what you will feed others with. So today again, starting a new piece for an exhibition in Patna next month. And there it is. The paddy stalks already. I did not even decide. They just came. 🙏

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani district in Bihar. I want to ask something to those who have dealt with galleries. My first attempt was not by email at all. There was an exhibition in Patna where I had sent two paintings through a cooperative, and a gallery person saw them there and asked who is the artist. That is how my first proper show came, not by applying but by someone seeing the work hanging. After that I tried emailing some galleries in Delhi, and mostly no reply came. So my experience is: the work has to be seen by eyes. But I know many artists now send portfolio by email only, and some gallerists say never come without appointment. So tell me ji, which way you did it? Email with photos first, or you carried the paintings and went? And for those who walked in, did they see you or send you away? I want to know what actually works, because I am still learning this side of things. 🙏

One gentleman came to look at my paintings at the exhibition in Patna. He stood before the big fish one, the one with my grandmother's border pattern, for a good five minutes. I thought he was appreciating. Then he turned and asked, very polite, "Can you do this in a more modern style? Something for a flat in Delhi." I told him this painting is not old because nobody thought to make it new. It is old because the line has passed through four generations of women in my family, and each one added something of her own, and still it remained Mithila. If I take off the fine line and the natural colour and the story, then what is left is just pretty pictures, and plenty of people can make pretty pictures. He said he understood. He bought a small fish anyway. So maybe he understood a little. But it sits in me. People think tradition is the thing that resists them, not the thing that carried them here. They want the art without the weight. I do not know how to explain that the weight is the art.

My daughter, she studies in Patna now, came home for Diwali and saw me sitting with the brush and she said, Baba why are you not putting this on the phone. I told her I don't understand all this. So she took the phone, and she made one of those short videos, just my hand and the brush and the fish I was drawing, not even twenty seconds. She put some music on top which I found too loud, but I said nothing. In one week people came to my stall asking for the fish painting. A lady from Delhi bought two. A girl came and said she saw me on Instagram and wanted to learn. All this after I spent so many years doing exhibitions and cooperative meetings the proper way. I felt like such a fool ji, that the thing I ignored was the thing that worked. Now I am learning. My niece is teaching me to hold the phone steady while I paint. But I am also worried. The video showed the fish and the peacock, but nobody saw the ten years behind that line, the discipline, the ritual, the grandmother who taught my mother who taught me. I want the buyers but I also want them to know this is not decoration, this is our history. How do I put the history in a twenty second video without losing the people.

Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani, Bihar. I do not come from the gallery world at all, so please forgive if my question is simple. My first time showing outside Bihar, it was not a big city gallery. It was a small craft shop in Patna, and the owner was an elderly gentleman. He looked at my work for a long time without saying anything, and I thought he is not liking it. Then he said only this: "Who taught you the fish? The fish is correct." That was all. No talk of price, no talk of exhibition. But that one line stayed with me for years. So I want to ask. Not how you got the show. What is the one sentence the gallery person said to you that you never forgot? It can be the good one. It can also be the one that wounded you, I do not mind. Those stay longer sometimes. Kindly share ji. I think we all carry one such line around.